Better HDR images

HDR or High Dynamic Range photography has been a rage long enough now, that the rage has started to take a turn. in the inception of the this technique the goal was to capture the greater dynamic range of a scene. Digital camera's only have so much exposure range, therefor they can mot capture a sunset in one shot. They have to expose for the shadows(blowing out the sky), or the sky crushing the shadows. Solution? HDR. The concept is fabulous but the practice has become something else. This is where peoples paths will part company. I do not like over sharpened extremely glowing whacked out landscapes. I use HDR to capture the details and exposure range, But I do not use programs like Photomatix that always put their own animated spin on my image. Lots of people use Photomatix  because it is easy to use and produces results that the average viewer will find acceptable, but it also teaches you nothing and make you  a complacent photographer with the same processing and hundreds if not thousands of over photographers. The two images about are processed entirely with Adobe merge to HDR and finished in adobe Photoshop. The first image is more complex then the second. This is a Home Depot Kitchen design. I wanted the home owner in the image. So  set my camera on a tripod, and photographed the scene with her in it using strobes. I then moved her out and  shot a seven exposure HDR with available light only. Back at the lab, I merged my seven shots into something very low contrast and boring looking. This is step one to a good HDR or any image with complex details, color and hue. Your starting image should be much softer then what you intent the final image to be. I adjust my HDR sliders for maximum range (no loss of highlights).   Once the image was merged. I opened the raw file of my subject in a small adobe raw window and hovered it over the HDR image on my Photoshop screen. I adjusted the color temp and contrast to be similar and opened the image in Photoshop with the same color and bit depth info. (I always use 16bit for color gradients) I  dragged my subject image over the HDR and made it a new layer, created a mask, filled with black and painted her back in. I now have the best of both world a kitchen that does not look artificially lit, and a perfectly lit subject.

So the above technique may scare some people like my wife who says "I'm scared of layers," Well don't be. Layers and good masks are the key to independent control of any image. I use layers, and masks to adjust the image contrast, color, hue and sharpening. I do not sharpen the sky and I feather my sharpening with my depth of field. I like to use curves a lot to pull the contrast in to the HDR image that I converted to look dull. Now I can work the image all over it's regions independently. Photomatics would make all of these controls globally, affecting the whole image rather then the areas of my choosing. Nix software does now have and HDR program with their U-point controls to affect areas with some separation control, but still no where near as powerful as Photoshop masks, and layer blending options can do. I am not writing this for people who just want to have fun with HDR, but rather the frustrated photographer looking to create a truly professional Landscape or architectural image. Here is a list of common errors in HDR proccessing and what to avoid if you would like your work to stand out.

Halos: These are glowing edges were trees and land masses such as mountain ranges meet the sky. They are cause by over processing and specifically pushing the the radius of the any sharpening algorithm to far.

Ghosts: These are cause by moving object in the image. Photoshop Merge to HDR pro has a good detection for this. A good trick if the remove ghosts is struggling is to erase the moving object from that frame and merge tiff files rather then the raw files.

Chromatic aberrations: these are the natural assurance from lenses fragmenting the colors of light. check and correct all your files in Lightroom or camera raw before merging. if they are still present in the merge you have to clone them out of the final. It sucks but not to bad it you use a Wacom Tablet. I do stress using clone and not the healing  brush, because the CA will be on the edges of things with very different color and contrast, and you need these to be crisp. 

Crispy over sharpened sky and clouds: keep the sky and clouds soft people unless you are making an abstract image but the client will probably want a pleasing sky. So again if you merge a soft image you can selectively sharpen the regions you want sharp and keep the sky soft as God intended. Sharpen the image last and doit on a duplicate layer with a mask and a soft brush. paint the sharpness on by verrying the opacity of the brush 100 percent for you most focussed regions and feather back to 50,25,and 10. Then Gaussian blur the mask to blend it out with 10 to 20 percent. then choose the mask edge... control in CS5 choose and overly veiw to see the red mask adjust the feather and shift edge to get a good blend of how you mask should feather out to the edge of the skyline.

Color is a huge subject I will not get into now because it deserves it's own post entirely. So I have given you some of my opinions and tips. Now I challenge you to Make the Photo you set out to get with out software programs taking you for a ride. Have fun people...