Additional Fun with HDR Photography

Previously I’ve discussed the steps in configuring your DSLR camera for taking a series of photographs of the same scene with different exposure in order to begin crating a HDR image. I went back to my photo library within Adobe Lightroom and decided to let the software recreate the various exposures needed for that first initial step. One among many advantages of shooting RAW is that you’re free to manipulate your original shot image without actually compressing and destroying pixels that compose your photograph. Each time you apply additional modifications to your jpeg images within Photoshop, and continue to resave your changes, you’re actually deteriorating the quality of your image. The act of saving your image as a jpeg actually compresses the pixels within the image.

The image at top began as seen at right. I’ve duplicated the image twice, imported it back into Adobe Lightroom and over exposed the first duplicate image and under exposed the second duplicate. As in the previous article, I imported all 3 images into Photomatrix, applied a series of settings until I was satisfied with the result. I then imported the image back into Adobe Lightroom and wrapped my workflow process by adjusting the contrast and color vibrance.

At left is another image I experimented with applying the very same steps. In the near future I’ll begin experimenting with some long exposures of night photography and apply the same steps in creating some interesting HDR photography. If you still haven’t seen any other examples of HDR photography, I urge you to just Google search “HDR”, people have taken HDR techniques to a whole new level.