If you want to find one sure photography topic that will give you endless great shots then just look up (you’re outside right?). On a good cloudy day the sky changes by the minute and presents to you a multitude of shapes and colours. Throw in the sun for good measure and you can capture something real special. I found myself looking skywards after my climb of Ben Bulben. It was extremely windy, and I can not over-emphesise how windy, so my interest soon turned from making myself dizzy looking up to not falling off the edge of the mountain. In spite of my near death experience I did take three not too shabby shots of the sun passing across my lens - I was standing in the same position and merely shifted my lens to reposition the sun. TA-DAA! I also did a little touching up on them - I altered the curves to darken the darks and lighten the lights, and also saturated the blues and yellows a little to bring out the colour in the sky and sun. As soon as I get home to my camera I think I’ll start a sky portfolio of sorts - look out for more sky pictures as they happen…
For A Panoramic View, Head To Croagh Patrick
Sunrise Pictures
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
This post is a quick follow up to my post on which single exposure range is best for making HDR-esque photographs. Rather than using a single exposure range (e.g. ±1, or ±2, or ±3), most people will use multiple exposure ranges to capture the entire range of lights and darks in a scene. Using multiple exposures seems the most sensible route to take anyway - heading out with your camera and taking one metered photo along with a single under- and over-exposed image may limit your post processing possibilities, so it’s best to take as many as reasonably possible. Note I didn’t take multiple shots of the photo below - I didn’t even take the photo! The different exposure are simply from adjusting the exposure levels in photoshop and saving as TIFFS. I really have to begin using auto-bracketing!
1. HDR Of The Metered Photo and ±1, ±2 Exposures
If you’ve seen the first post then you know how the metered photo and ±2 EV looks. Using ±1 and ±2 exposures gives more detail in the clouds, they almost look painted on, but the building looks slightly more washed out. Also the lighting across the building is pretty uneven for some reason. There is however more detail in the ripples of the water.
2. HDR Of The Metered Photo and ±1, ±2, ±3 Exposures
The lighting across the building is slightly more even, however some areas of the sky are becoming washed out due to the very overexposed area of the +3 exposure. This is something to be careful when using overexposed images - there’s no need to go so overexposed the entire image is washed out. Thumbs of the different exposures can be seen in the first post - in retrospect the ±3 and ±4 exposures are probably too under- and over exposed.
3. HDR Of The Metered Photo and ±1, ±2, ±3, ±4 Exposures
I don’t like this result, plain and simple - too many areas are washed out and there is nothing in it that improves over earlier efforts. There’s nothing more to say on it.
Related Articles:
Tutorial To Create A High Dynamic Range Photo (HDR) From A Single RAW Image.
Creating Ultra Vibrant Tone-Mapped Surreal HDR Photos With Photomatix Pro
What Is The Best Exposure Range For HDR Photos? Part I
One of the necessities of creating pseudo-High Dynamic Range photographs is having multiple exposures of the same shot. This gives us the full tonal range of a natural scene needed to blend a HDR together. Blending is followed by tone mapping, which maps the colours contained in the dynamic range of the HDR to a rough set of similar colours that can then be displayed on monitors or any equipment that doesn’t have the full dynamic range to view the HDR in its true form properly. The question that follows then is how many different exposures do you need to take? And across how wide a range? ±1EV? ±2EV? Some people might go as far as ±4EV to be sure they capture every single shadow and light. Now while combining the metered image with 2, 4 or 6 exposures will give us a higher dynamic range image, I wanted to see how well the HDR process works using just a metered image (i.e. at 0EV) along with just two differently exposed duplicates; taken at ±1EV, ±2EV and ±4EV. For this example I’ve used Photomatix to create the mock HDR.
Here is each exposure as taken from the single RAW image in Photoshop (I’ve said it before - I never have a tripod with me so taking 3 or more RAW shots in near perfect alignment is impossible for me!). The exposures range from -4EV to +4EV with the metered image sitting in between them.
1. The Original (Metered) Photograph
First things first. Below is the original shot saved as a jpg from the RAW. As you can see the shot is generally a little over-exposed (the sky very) and most features are looking a little bland. A bit a post-processing is necessary me thinks.
2. Photomatix Using Just The RAW File
So the first step in this experiment is to run the single RAW image, no multiple exposures, through Photomatix and try to keep everything looking at least half realistic: The Photomatix results using just the RAW image came out reasonably well below: the colours in the building and the statue are stronger and give the picture more life, without looking over-saturated. The sky however looks washed out, almost as if it was part of a water painting. So Photomatixing a single exposure doesn’t seem to give great results, at least for this example - on to using our metered shot and ±1 exposed shots.
3. Photomatix Using RAW And Just ±1EV Exposures
Using the ±1EV exposures along with the RAW file has definitely improved the situation: there is a little more tonal range on the statue and across the building compared to the Photomaxifed RAW, and the sky is showing much improvement. I posted this photo over at The Photo Forum for some opinions. Now lets try ±2EV.
4. Photomatix Using RAW And Just ±2EV Exposures
The results of using ±2EV Exposures are similar to that of the ±1EV photo. We can tell though that the colours in the sky are slightly more contrasted / saturated. One improvement I think is the shadowing on the statue’s leg, which has been reduced a little due to the greater exposure range.
5. Photomatix Using RAW And Just ±3EV Exposures
OK now things are beginning to go downhill! Although the rest of the shot is holding up well, the sky has been washed out due to using too wide a range of exposures; remember the ±1EV or ±2EV have not been used here so we are missing all the information contained in those exposures - the gap between the metered shot at 0EV and exposures at ±3EV has grown too great. We need the information in these exposures to accurately capture the proper tones. Let see though what happens if we increase the exposure range even more!
6. Photomatix Using RAW And Just ±4EV Exposures
Well this is just a progression from the photo before - the sky is washed out even more. I’m surprised though that the rest of the image is more or less unchanged, I guess it has something to do with the original composition of colour and contrasts but I’m just guessing.
When taking multiple exposures for a HDR image and you only wish to take one on either side of you metered shot, there’s no real need to choose huge ±EV number: 1 or 2 seems to suffice: my S9600 offers auto braketing only up to ±1EV which I always thought was too narrow, until now! Go beyond 1 or 2EV and you risk saturating your photographs with cartoon like textures. If you like taking 5 or 7 shots for merging however, you can disregard this post!
Related Articles:
Tutorial To Create A High Dynamic Range Photo (HDR) From A Single RAW Image.
Creating Ultra Vibrant Tone-Mapped Surreal HDR Photos With Photomatix Pro
A 28mm wide angle lens has a viewing angle of around 76° degrees, a circular fisheye lens will give you a 180° viewing angle, and a wacky distorted image, but as far as I know there’s no such thing as a 360° lens (yet). This limitation makes it a little difficult in creating 360° panoramic images of your favorite horizons. Fortunately if you take stand in one spot and rotate incrementally while taking multiple images, each one overlapping the next by about a quarter, they can be imported into Photoshop (CS3 anyway, I’m not so sure about earlier versions) and merged together quite seamlessly.
The procedure is simple but there are a few options to choose from. First of all we have to choose our images. To illustrate I’m going to use some photos I took while on the top of Benbulben (a small mountain in Ireland). The final image itself is far from spectacular: it’s mostly just grass, but that’s not the point here - I want to show you how overlapping images (of any sort) can be combined. Here are the images I’ve chosen to merge:
With Photoshop open go to File -> Automate -> Photomerge. We are now presented with this box:
Immediately we can see on the left five options for merging our images and options for selecting the images themselves. For most people, myself included, choosing ‘Auto’ from the left-hand-side options is usually the safest way to go - Photoshop does a great job in stitching images together and most of the time the process is seamless. For completeness sake however I tried combining my images using each process to see what results I could get.
1. Auto
As expected Auto merging has done it’s job well: from the image below we can see, or rather can’t see, any sign of stitching between each photo. What Photoshop has done here is place all the image files onto their own layer, on one large canvas (see right) and searched for similarities between each image. Depending on how much similarity Photoshop finds between each one, it arranges them accordingly and applies a mask layer to each layer. Finally Photoshop removes any part of the photo that isn’t useful, usually any sections near the interface of two fo the images, as well as the rest of the canvas for that layer. This can take a while for Photoshop to do - for this example it took about 10 minutes or so. Choosing the auto option has the advantage of using a ‘click and forget’ approach: it gives very good results but you can’t fine tune the image positioning if you feel you need to. Personally I think the panoramic shot below would be far better if I could centre the view on the right had side, leaving the grassy sections on the outer edges of the shot. I’ve left the image uncropped so you can see how much you can typically expect to lose from each photo when you actually do the cropping.
2. Perspective
Tyring to photomerge the images using the Perspective option didn’t fare so well - I got this message half ways through the merging process:
Some images could not be automatically aligned.
Choosing perspective is useful if there is a good sense of distance in your shot. Using the Interactive Layout option later on I was able to apply perspective to some of the images (albeit with another error) that you can see below.
3. Cylindrical
If you wish to create a panoramic image in which you want to exaggerate curvature, for example the horizon of the earth shot from a plane or a mountain top, then you should try using Cylindrical Photomerging. I don’t think it applies to the photos here but I’ve used it quickly anyway for completeness sake.
4. Reposition Only
The reposition only option allows you to move each image once Photoshop has finished merging them, so if for example you feel one could be positioned a little bit better you are free to do so, but Photoshop won’t re-blend afterwards which means you’ll have to alter the mask layer yourself if needs be. Sounds like a lot of hassle for very little gain in my opinion. You can see in the thumbnail below the gaps between each image - they won’t show up after you save
5. Interactive Layout
The interactive layout option gives you full control in positioning each image and applying perspective. It will also try to blend each image again after repositioning, a big advantage over the Reposition Option.
You can easily see from the image below that even after I move each photo completely out of place Photoshop will do its best and try to blend them together anyway - something that won’t happen using the Reposition Only option.
I tried applying perspective here and while I still got an error…
Photomerge was not able to automatically correct the perspective for all of the images.
…photoshop allowed me to remove a couple of image and I was left with whats below. Unfortunately Photoshop has completely blown the long shot image in an attempt to add the perspective. I suspect this is because there is such a sharp change in distance from one shot to the next.
So if you have multiple photos then that you wish to merge into one long panoramic scene then you can try some of the option here that Photoshop has available. You can see the final shot here; like I said earlier it’s mostly just grass! I’ve made a slightly more interesting one from the top of Croagh Patrick that you can see here also!
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One thing that most people have to do quite a bit if they have a website with a lot of photographs on it is resizing. It’s great to keep high resolution, high Megabyte originals on your hard-drive, but when displaying them on a website, one must account for their monthly bandwidth allowance from whatever provider they are affiliated to. Even more importantly, they have to be aware that visitors will not hang around long waiting for large files to download. So it’s good idea to know that when it comes to minimizing megabytes, some programs out there are better at resizing an image than other. A lot better. You have a lot of flexibility when dealing with thumbnails also because in addition to them being low resolution, they don’t have to be saved at the highest quality either.
For this little comparison a RAW image (saved size is 18.3MB) with a resolution 3488×2616pixels was converted to a jpg in Photoshop without any other post-processing. The image quality was set to level 10 and saved, giving a new saved size of 2.3MB. I usually give thumbs of pictures an resolution of 400×300pixels so the visitor can still see the image clearly without having to wait long for it to load. In Photoshop, resizing this jpg down to 400×300pixels using the Bicubic Sharper algorithm and saving it at level 4 (low). The resulting file still comes out at 116kb! Far too big for a thumbnail image I think! The image can be seen here.
Using the exact same procedure in GIMP the image came out at 20kb, which is much more manageable. The GIMP output can be seen here. Some of the vibrancy in colour has been lost in the GIMP version but I would argue that this loss in detail is more than compensated for by the 500%+ reduction in file-size. Remember, thumbnails are only supposed to be links to larger, better quality images, they only serve to give the visitor a sneak preview of the full picture. Bear in mind that this was merely a rough and ready comparison between the two programs; no doubt there are numerous settings I could have toyed with for hours to give a different result - I simply went with the default settings for now as they both give reasonable results and you shouldn’t dwell too much on thumbnail quality anyway.
Chromatic aberrations (commonly called colour fringing) are one of the most common and yet annoying photographic artifacts that occur in digital images. You’ll most likely find them in high contrast regions of your photos such as the edges of buildings or the branches of trees. They are caused by the fact that the visible spectrum is made up of not one but six monochromatic colours, (green, yellow, violet, blue, orange red) each with a unique wavelength. These differing wavelength alter the speed at which each colour enters a cameras lens, since the refractive index of the lens is wavelength dependant, and so dispersion of the colours can occur. This dispersion can be minimised by using specialist equipment such as an achromatic lens but that’s not much good advice if you’ve already shot a couple hundred pictures and now find green and purple fringing present. Don’t worry, there’s always hope! In Photoshop CS3 there are a number of ways to remove colour fringing with just a little effort.
1. The Sponge Tool.
The Sponge Tool in Photoshop can be used to either saturate or desaturate colour and is used in exactly the same way as the eraser, so is ideal if you want to remove small regions of colour fringing. It can be found in the tool bar as shown here on the right. Depending on Photoshop’s default settings the dodge tool or burn tool might be visible instead. Once you select the sponge tool you can set the brush size, choose saturate or desaturate, and choose the flow percentage (the pressure that the sponge is being pressed against the picture.) These settings should be visible just above the image, although it might be different on a windows machine - I am using a Mac. In any case, once you are satisfied with the setting you can sponge over the affected regions (using desaturate I would imagine) and gradually fade the fringing away to a non-noticeable greyish colour. It’s probably best to begin with a fairly low flow percentage (maybe 40%) and increase it once you gauge its effect.
2. Adjustment Layers.
This is most effective if you want to remove a lot of fringing of a particular colour in one swoop. When you first open you image, if the layers palette is open (Window -> Layers), you image should be present and called Background. It will also have a lock symbol beside it. Double click the image to convert it to a layer. Then add a Hue / Saturation layer (either by Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Hue/Saturation or adding it from the options at the bottom of the layers palette). The box below should appear.
What we want to do now is, using the Saturation (and possibly the Brightness) scale, desaturate all of a particular color fringing that is causing us grief, e.g. purple. “Master” refers to the entire image so lowering the saturation will desaturate the everything - not what we want! Click edit and change it any other colour, it doesn’t really matter which one since we’ll be choosing the colour we want directly from the image using the eyedropper - make sure the first one is selected in the Hue/Saturation box (see above) and select the colour we want to desaturate. You might have to zoom in first. Alter the brightness also if the desaturation is too bright.
Once this step is complete a mask layer might be necessary if any desirable purples in the image were unintentionally desaturated. In the Hue/Saturation layer to the right we can see a second blank box. This is the mask layer and will negate the effect of the adjustment layer that it’s attached to - it masks it, geddit? There’s more to masks but for the moment all we have to do is select the paintbrush, choose black as the paint colour and brush over any region in our image that we don’t want to be affected by the adjustment layer (it’s a good idea to turn on and off the adjustment layer using the eye symbol beside the layer to see what parts of the image were affected and which parts we have to mask).
Two easy ways to remove colour fringing!
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