ProjectVISUAL

I’ll say this right out. There are no best settings. It’s personal preference. Right, post over, goodbye.

You’re still here? OK maybe I should elaborate on my first statement. I’m not going to talk about the theory behind HDR, nearly everyone has an idea of what is meant by it – greater tonal range is my interpretation. To complicate the matter slightly though, there are two main HDR opinion camps. Camp 1 interprets HDR as photos that realistically recreate what the eye saw when the picture was taken, and I would agree that this is technically what HDR is, or was originally about. There is a Camp 2 however, who say that HDR is all about creating photos with blown out colours, imposing skies and acid fuelled backgrounds. Personally I prefer a little towards the over the top surreal side of things and so it is in that respect I will talk about what I think are the best settings for Photomatix.

1. Strength.
I usually use the Strength slider in conjunction with Colour Saturation as by itself it seems to do little, at least for my purposes. With Strength at 100% a Colour Saturation of 0% will give you a black & white image and the histogram will shift far to the left. As a personal rule I would leave the Strength between 70% and 90%. It works in most situations.

2. Colour Saturation.
This is an obvious one; if you want your pictures to jump with vibrancy then crank this up near 100%. At 100% saturation vibrancy can be increasesd more by dropping the Strength slider down to 50% – 60% if you wish.

3. Light Smoothing.
If you want over the top halos in your images then you should set this very low. Personally I would set it to either Medium or High – it gives a more gradual change in the lighting across boundaries e.g. tree lines, horizons etc. So, Low = More Halos and darker colours, High = Less Halos, more realistic colour tones and shadows.

4. Tone – Luminosity.
Increasing the Luminosity will, unsurprisingly, increase the brightness of your image, but will also highlight any noise that may be present, especially in skies or any other large single colour area. One tip to overcome this problem, and something I do often, is to reduce the Luminosity incrementally while increasing the Gamma levels by the same increment until you are happy with the light levels. The Gamma will mask the noise better while still giving plenty of lighting.

5. Tone – White / Black Point.
I almost never even touch these but you can bump them up to the right if you want some extra contrast in your super HDR’s.

6. Tone – Gamma.
I’ve mentioned Gamma before, if noise isn’t a problem then decreasing the Gamma will darken your image and bring out more shadows, giving the whole scene are much darker mood. Don’t go too high with this though – all the colour will become washed out and will actually look quite sickening. DON’T DO IT!

7. Colour – Temperature.
Another obvious one – increasing the temperature will overlay hotter colours like yellows, oranges and reds through your image, giving it a warm feel. Conversely decreasing the temperature will add more blues to your image. I usually leave it at about +2 or +3 unless I’m looking to express a particular mood in a picture.

8. Colour – Saturation Highlights.
I leave this at default 99% or the time – it seems to do very little for me.

9. Colour – Saturation Shadows.
Again, 99% of the time I just leave it at default. I might play with it to see if it improves anything but it generally does very little.

10. Micro – Microcontrast.
I like the colour of every little feature (e.g the cobbles on roads, leaves, bricks, crevices in doorways) to contrast against one another so I almost always crank the microcontrast all the way up to +10. Lets face it; a HDR should jump out at you and scream “WOW!” Setting the Microcontrast too low will just reduce the relative intensity in your colours and wash out the while scene.

11. Micro – Mocrosmoothing.
It you like Microcontrast you’ll hate Microsmoothing – I set this one to its minimum value. I don’t want anything to be smoothed out when I’m making a HDR.

12. S/H – Hightlights Smoothing.
Leave it at minimum. (Again, this is my preference, just because it smooths out highlights). If you prefer to smooth highlights out, by all means find your preferred setting.

13. S/H – Hightlights Smoothing.
More smoothing?! Minimise it!

14. S/H – Shadows Clipping.
Increasing the Shadow Clipping will give more prominence to any shadowing that is already in your image and can increase it visual impact. e.g. if you want to exaggerate the level of shadowing that is within a landscape shot. If you set it too high though then everything will become a shadow!

So they are all the settings in Photomatix. I’ve intentionally not included any images to illustrate these settings for this post as the settings are not independent of each other. So for example if I showed two images highlight the difference between high and low strength, this difference would itself be different, depending on what level colour saturation, microcontrast, temperature etc was set at. I think it’s better if you have your own photo open in Photomatix; you can then go through this post changing the settings you feel it will help get your picture the way you want it. I should be buying the Nikon D300 tomorrow (and I can not wait to use its auto-bracketing since the S9600 has none in RAW mode, and DSLR sounds so much cooler than bridge camera), so I’m sure I’ll do a detailed post on these settings specifically with the D300 and auto-bracketing in mind. Chow!

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