While most of my time in Barcelona was surrounded by miserable weather and rain, I did quickly snap this fine piece of machinery parked along a narrow street. I’ve walked by quite a few motorcycles in my time (eh big deal?) but this is actually the first time I’ve had my camera handy when doing so. It’s a real shame that the weather was so shitty while I was there, oh well, maybe I’ll go back later on in the year…
Technorati Tags: projectvisual, Nikon, D300, Barcelona, Bike, Motorcycle, Harley Davidson
The photo in question was taken with my S9600 and what seems like oh so long ago, but the only good quality version I have unfortunately is of the flickr upload – I’ll have to locate the 
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 
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.
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 
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 
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!
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.
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!.
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.
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.
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.
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!
This guide is quick and to the point – no padding. Some settings for your camera are recommended and how to set them on a 
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.
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.)
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 
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.
