HDR Photography and Workflow

If you Google search HDR photography you’ll be absolutely amazed by what you’ll find. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. It’s a process of taking simultaneous photographs with your DSLR camera, while having each photo set with a different exposure. Depending on your DSLR camera, there are a variety ways of setting your camera to shoot under a different exposure. Personally, I choose to utilize a tripod, take 3 consecutive photographs with the first one set to -EV 1, second to EV 0, and the third EV, 1.

The steps that you’ll take after importing your images, and utilizing various settings will vary obviously. My camera is a Canon XSI DSLR, I used a tripod to steady the camera and my workflow applications are Adobe Lightroom, and Photomatrix Pro from HDR Soft. Below are the original images I’ve shot with those settings.

After Importing my images into Adobe Lightroom, or any other workflow application you use to store your images, select them, and use your application’s menu to display their location on your computer. If you’ve never attempted in creating HDR images, download an application called Photomatrix Pro and use the trial version for now until you’re ready to purchase the full version. Launch Photomatrix Pro, click on “Generate HDR Image” and drag and drop your RAW files directly into the window. Click “OK” in order to generate your HDR image. The result that you get is nowhere near complete.

To the left is the resulting image. Obviously we’re nowhere near complete as the image generated is an equal distribution of both shadows and light contained within each image that we’ve just combined. Click on Tone Mapping and play around with the settings there until you’re satisfied with the settings. Strength, Color saturation, luminosity, light smoothing, Micro contrast, are the additional settings you should be playing with.The image at right is what I was left with after applying my settings. After completing adjusting the various settings within Photomatrix Pro, export the image back to Lightroom, still as a RAW file, and continue adjusting the exposure, color, shadow, and light intensity until you’re satisfied. My final result is shown at the beginning of this article. I chose to increase contrast, tone down some highlights, and increase some of the shadows.

If you’ve never heard of HDR, you’re probabely wandering what the heck did the application do to your iamges and why you had to photograph the same scene with different exposure levels. In a nut shell HDR is the process of combining a set of photographs with different exposures. To the naked eye, an under exposed image is either a throw away or additional work needed to correct it. Over exposed images can typically receive some work by using various applications to tone down various settings in order to bring some shadows and darks back into the image. However, both over and under exposed images maintain import information about the amount of light and shadows contained in the photograph. HDR is the process of combining that information in order to create a surreal image.