Photography Post-Processing: Questions and How-Tos (HDR :getin:)

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > The Dorkroom > Photography Post-Processing: Questions and How-Tos (HDR :getin:)

Gambl0r: Dec 25, 2003; LOCAL MAN
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I wrote a how-to on the steps I take when I do HDR processing a while ago. If it's ok, I'll just paste it in here. The photo I used as an example is this one.

The following may not be new to a lot of you, but I think it serves as a good reminder that a HDR photo is not necessarily 'done' right out of Photomatix. I spend a lot more time editing the results from Photomatix than I do during the actual tonemap.

quote:

I started with three separate images taken with the Canon 40D. I was using Auto Exposure Bracketing, with the camera set to take exposures at -2,0,+2 EV.

(Side note for 40D users! The exposure bracketing on the 40D won't go any further that +-2, but one cool thing that I've found is that you can rotate the control wheel so your middle exposure is set to -2, and your three bracketed shots will actually be -4,-2,0 EV. Scroll the wheel all the way to the other end of the spectrum and you'll have +4, +2, 0 EV... so effectively you've taken five shots between -4 and +4 with two shutter presses!)

So I took those three exposures and used Photoshop to automatically align them. I shot these with a timer on a tripod, so there was no movement between shots... but in cases where there is movement, I find Photoshop does a much better job than Photomatix at aligning the images.

Save that as a tif, open in Photomatix for tonemapping. Really I have found that every photo requires different settings in Photomatix, but all the sliders and options are laid out in plain view so it's very easy to experiment. Recently I've found that I like to 'over-HDR' the image and then selectively scale it back in Photoshop. So the photo labeled 'Photomatix Tonemap' in the image above was really never meant to be seen by anyone other than me I dislike that kind of overdone-HDR shot, and if I wasn't planning on doing any other work after tonemapping, I would have set the overall HDR effect much lower. HDR can really help a shot with a wide range of tones, from dark to light... but the downside is all the extreme highlights and shadows are kind of being evened out, which can make things look flat (to me). For example, look at the ceiling in the image labeled 'Photomatix Tonemap' above. The ceiling is nice and detailed, but it also appears that it's getting just as much light as the freezer in the foreground (which you can see is not the case from the original photos). More on this later.

I saved the tonemapped image to another tif, and brought it into Lightroom. There I changed some things which might seem strange. I took the color saturation of the image almost to zero. Then I made large adjustments to the 'Camera Calibration' section to give a cyan cast to the entire image. Then I worked with the 'Split Toning' section to make the shadows a dark blue-purple, and the highlights a yellow-green. I adjusted the tone curve a little bit and saved these adjustments to a preset called 'Decay Cold'.

I applied those presets to the original '0 EV' shot, so I had one blue-green colored tonemapped image (labeled 'Lightroom Adjusted' in the image above) and one blue-green colored original photo (labeled '0 EV Lightroom Adjusted' in the image above).

I brought both of them into Photoshop, placed the HDR shot as the top layer, and added a mask to it. Then I chose a brush with a low hardness setting and started painting over the areas I didn't want such an extreme amount of 'HDR-look'. You can see from the mask that I got rid of a lot of the HDR effect on the front of the freezer, on the ceiling, and on the back wall. I left the most HDR effect in the ice, because I thought it looked awesome Lastly, I placed a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer over everything and used a gradient mask to apply it only to the ceiling - to darken it up. I think this brings back the sense of depth in the shot.

Gambl0r fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Jan 13, 2009

# ¿ Jan 13, 2009 01:24

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 10:05

Gambl0r: Dec 25, 2003; LOCAL MAN
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evensevenone posted:

Cool! Sounds like there's interest. I think the best way is if anyone interested emails me 1 unloved raw that you don't mind giving up all rights and creative control over, I'll pick 3-5 and make a torrent, everyone downloads torrent and goes to town, then in a week or two we make a thread where we post our images... it'd be cool if everyone did theirs without seeing each others.

I don't see the point of putting any particular rules or restrictions, beside being willing to tell us how you did it and give insight into your process and decisions. And of course you can do as few or as many as you'd like.

I'll make another thread if people generally think this is a good way to do it.

I suppose we could vote on the raws if we really want to be hyper-democratic.

We need to get this going!

A) I can provide hosting for the RAW files so we don't have to deal with torrents
B) We can't access your email address through your profile to send you images
C) We should make a new thread for this now (or at least when the RAWs are selected), to make it more visible instead of hidden on page 17 of this thread.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2009 02:25

Gambl0r: Dec 25, 2003; LOCAL MAN
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1st AD posted:

Haha, my friend is the photographer who did this: http://deanbradshaw.com.au/Diageo-Stark-Raving

Here's a behind the scenes video I did for this shoot:
https://vimeo.com/46667864

I'm a little late commenting on this, but your behind the scenes video made me wonder - the lights in the studio dim with each shot - is this the modeling lights going off before the shot, and then back on after? Wouldn't the strobes overpower the modeling lights so much that it wouldn't matter if they were on? I have no idea how the studio environment works (obviously).

The final shots and your video are both great.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2012 04:47

Gambl0r: Dec 25, 2003; LOCAL MAN
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Molten Llama posted:

They're probably dimming while the flash recycles.

Ahh, that makes sense. Thanks!

Mathturbator posted:

Yeah, I should probably do that. And it wouldn't be such a hassle of I could just point it to the top-level folder or year folder - or even the monthly folder. But it wants me to point to a specific file, in every god drat folder

I have a similar setup - all my photos are on an external server. If I startup LR without the server on, it tells me all the paths are missing, and will only let me look at the saved previews. But, all you have to do is close LR, plug in your drive (or in my case, start up my server), and then open LR and everything will be back - no need to go through the folders one by one.

Edit: If for some reason that doesn't work - try fixing one folder, then right click on it in the Library panel and choose 'Show Parent Folder'. It shooould reindex all the child directories, and you can click 'Hide this Parent' on the newly-shown parent folder once it's done.

Gambl0r fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Dec 23, 2012

# ¿ Dec 23, 2012 16:25

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > The Dorkroom > Photography Post-Processing: Questions and How-Tos (HDR :getin:)