ProjectVISUAL

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HDR photography has become quite popular in recent years. Some people like the over the top trippy acid looking results one can get with Photomatix (although Photomatix isn’t limited to this), while others prefer the greater flexibility and reputed more realistic results that can be got from Photoshop. To help yourself, and myself, see how weblogs approach HDR I’ve put together a list of 22 tutorials / guides that explain the process, from the basic drag and drop approaches to the more complicated post-processes one can do following tonemapping. Some of these guides you may have seen before, others are less popular, but they all offer something new for everyone.



1. Vanilla Days
This is a very popular HDR tutorial and compares the capabilities of Photoshop against Photomatix, concluding that Photomatix gives more control over the final image. It explains the essentials – auto-bracketing, merging and tone mapping. What makes this tutorial stand out from others is that is explains in good detail the tone mapping options available in Photomatix and provides results for different Photomatix settings. It also makes a lot of comparisons: using 1 RAW versus 3 RAWS, using jpgs instead of RAWS and direct comparisons between Photoshop and Photomatix. If you’re interested in creating HDRs this tutorials should definitely be in your bookmarks.



2. PopPhoto
This post, by Jack Howard, is a whopping 11 pages long and explains pretty much everything you need to know about putting together HDRs. With such depth you expect to gleam some nuggets of information – I knew Photomatix had exposure blending capabilities but I didn’t realise how limited they actually were until I read this. Like before, Photomatix and Photoshop are compared and the strengths and weaknesses of both are listed; quite useful if you’re in two minds over which one to buy. At the end of this tutorial there is a useful tips page listing a methodology for producing the best HDRs possible.



3. BackingWinds
Backing Winds is a blog maintained by Ryan McGinnis. He shows us how to create realistic looking HDRs using Photoshop – and definitely a guy whose against the ‘misuse’ that often occurs when creating HDRs with Photomatix (see a post of mine for an example!). His post is a great resource for anyone interested in using Photoshop, simply because it’s such a huge package and is less accessible than Photomatix – it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by Photoshops 19000 options! Ryan also give some pointer on adding those crucial finishing touches using Histogram and curve adjustments – very useful!



4. GrindGod
GrindGod has a very well layout guide, starting from the top with telling us the equipment we need to get started before getting into more detail with the various options that Photomatix provides. One flaw with this guide however is that there are no images describing the steps or showing any HDR examples.



5. CameraLabs
CameraLabs is a forum and this is simply a post on it, but it’s one heck of a post! The interesting thing about this post is that it was the guys first attempt, and it’s a very good one! There are pictures to go with every step also so it’s very easy to follow. The actual settings are shown so you have some benchmark settings that should work reasonably well to start with. This is a great tutorial for novices; however because it’s a posting on a forum there’s no guarantee that it will remain there long term – sometimes forum topics or posts can be removed either by the administration or the poster so if you find this guide useful it would be worthwhile saving it to your computer.



6. The 23x Blog
Another good tutorial, it has nothing new over the five previous ones but hey, it’s good to check out it’s work if HDR is your passion! It does have some great results – I love the photo of the boats (right) that is shown on the site. Right now I dream of being able to make a photo this good! It gives some essential tips such as using the same aperture for each shot – a lot of other tutorials seem to overlook this point. The author also has a link to their Flickr page where you can see more images.















7. Popsci
This guide has over 1500 Diggs since May 2007 so has proven very popular. It first describes what exactly a HDR image is, before showing us the differently exposed thumbnails that will be used for the final image. It then describes the two main programs used to create the HDR: Photoshop and Photomatix before describing a little what tone mapping is and finally comparing the original photo to the final tone mapped image. It also comments on an open source alternative, Qtpfsgui, available on Windows, MAC OSX and Linux.





8. Digital Camera Resource Page
This is another guide posting on a forum. It highlights the problem many people will have if they are creating HDR images from multiple RAW files – aligning of the source files. According to the guide Photomatix cannot align wide angle shots very well and so it recommends using a program called PTGui. It will warp and align each picture to match up perfectly with each other – handy if you don’t have a tripod nearby! The guide is quite detailed – it provides the original under- metered and over-exposed images, it provides the settings used to create the HDR and explains how the settings in Photomatix affect the final results – a good tutorial to check out.













9. Cambridge In Colour
Cambridge In Colour explains why increasing the dynamic range of your photography is a good thing, when and where the technique should be applied as well as some of the trade off that you will encounter by taking the HDR approach. Many people (myself included) treat HDR-esque post-processing as a black box; images go into Photomatix, HDR comes out followed by tone mapping. Cambridge In Colour delves behind the scenes and explains very well the mechanisms of HDR – well worth the read if you want to sound all knowledgeable on the topic .













10. NatureScapes
This isn’t so much a traditional guide as it is a book on the topic! You can download a 49 page pdf of this guide; well worth having saved to disk. It covers every aspect you could ask for: What is HDR?, Setting Up Input Images, Processing a Single Frame HDR Image and Processing Multiple Frame HDR Images. The HTML version also provides a gallery of very good HDR images towards the end that’s worth checking out. By the way the book is free so you’ve really got no excuse not to check it out!







11. PhotoShop Support
This is an advanced tutorial in Photoshop – for those of use used to the black box approach of Photomatix, be prepared for a challenge! The main focus of this tutorial is overcoming the problem of combining images in which subjects in the images have moved between different exposures. This is achieved using smart objects. There’s quite a bit of manual work involved (oh No!) but it gives you more flexibility in the long run when you are post-processing your hard days shots.





12. Duane Storey
A quick tutorial with a great subject (see right) this guide uses Photomatix to create a great scene of the Vancouver skyline. Five images were used to make the final image and from what I can gather from the guide, the HDR was made using jpg images – very impressive!.







13. Abduzeedo
Abduzeedo uses a simple subject to get a very color rich final result. There are plenty of illustrations to go with this tutorial as well so there’s no way you’ll get lost while using it. It’s also the first guide I’ve seen where a HDR was made from a compact camera, showing that high end DSLR’s are not essential for getting good results.







14. Thoughts From My Life
Thoughts from my life uses an interesting subject and Photoshops Merge To HDR options. Any photos taken indoors that have windows in them usually suffer from overexposure of whatever can be seen through the window – Thoughts From My Life shows how HDR can overcome this problem.







15. WebDesign Library
Here’s yet another site that uses Photoshop to create the HDR image from three differently exposed RAW pictures, followed by tone mapping in Photomatix to jazz up the final shot.

16. Easy HDR
EasyHDR is a piece of software I just came across while writing this post. I haven’t used it so can’t say much but the website gives a very comprehensive guide to all its functions and the illustrations of
HDRed photos look very impressive.



17. Slager Man Photo
Slager Man Photo shows the difference between the histogram of a regular picture and that of a HDR, something I’ve not seen anywhere else. They also have a link to a small gallery at the bottom of the guide of some seriously wacky looking sunsets!









18. Visual Photo Guide
This guide is quick and to the point – no padding. Some settings for your camera are recommended and how to set them on a Nikon D50 (the camera used for this tutorial) is explained. There’s also a link to a HDR video tutorial.



19. Picture Correct
Picture Correct throws together a little personal story to go with their guide – a nice touch. It uses only two images – one overexposed and one underexposed to get really good results. Layer masks are used as one choice to blend the photos so if you enjoy working with them then this guide is for you.







20. Grumpy Editors Guide To HDR
Every site I’ve listed so far has assumed that you are either using a windows or a mac machine, but what if you use Linux instead? Well then this tutorial is for you: it mentions OpenEXR, PFScalibration and Qtpfsgui as Linux HDR solutions. Tone mapping is then achieved with Qpfstmo (I’ve no idea why such strange names are used, if they give results then that all that matters.)







21. Digital Photography School
Digial Photography School is a very popular photography site and for many is the first choice of all photo related information on the internet. This guide is a guest post from Pixelens.com. It talks about the essentials, and compares Photomatix to less known programs (to me at least) such as the Photoshop plugin ReDynaMix. It also compares the difference in using different number of exposures and how much of a difference there is between using a single RAW and multiple RAWS.







22. Stuck In Customs
Stuck In Customs is a site by Tray Ratcliff, home to some of the most amazing HDR photographs I’ve ever seen. Seriously his work is world class and is the standard everyone should aspire to. From what I’ve seen he deals mostly with the surreal HDR look rather than the realistic look but you should check out his work to really see what can be done if you know how. It’s likely you’ve seen his work on plenty other sites – any list of “Amazing HDR Photographs” will likely contain more than one of his works.

After looking through these guides I feel rather humbled by my own efforts. I guess the saying is true – the more you know about a topic the more you realise how little you know.

Technorati Tags: HDR, photography, Photomatix, Photoshop, tonemapping, auto-bracketing, RAW, Qtpfsgui, PTGui