Creating The Realistic HDR Image

[Music] thank you Thanks well thanks for coming out I'm pretty excited to be teaching this class for several reasons number one it's one of my absolute favorite things to do and that is HDR and I'll tell you why in a minute but the other reason I just released a book on this called the realistic HDR image and so this is kind of nice follow-up to that and I'll give you guys some more information on that as well but you know the reason that I like this so much I think is because of where I came from that's New Jersey I came from the darkroom you guys and so my my career started working in the darkroom day-in day-out 40 hours a week black-and-white printing and that's the way I got started and I was constantly constantly trying to figure out how to make better prints how to get what I saw in the scene and it was very difficult spent a lot of time doing it and then Photoshop came around and Photoshop was significantly easier once you learn Photoshop you know that's very trouble troublesome there but but then HDR programs came out when they first came out I scoff at them ah just learn Photoshop that's the way to do it but they quickly got very good they got very very good and so I began using HDR and the reason is because most of the work that I do really revolves around shooting high-contrast scenes whether it's outside or whether it's inside that's the type of work I do and so HDR became you know the program working in the program became very very important to me right from right from the get-go so the first question is is what is HDR high dynamic range absolutely it stands for high dynamic range and really folks this word it people use this in a lot of different ways right so HDR could be a program such as the one I use called photomatix it could also be a file some people say you know look at my print it's an HDR image technically not but that's what we say that's an HDR image you know um it can be a photo it could be a print on the wall somebody will say oh that's an HDR print mm not technically but or people will even say I'm going to shoot some HDR and so it's the act of shooting is called HDR but truly HDR stands for high dynamic range and it's either a program or it's a file okay so that's what HDR truly means now when we talk about dynamic range dynamic range is the difference between the brightest part of a photograph in the darkest part of the photograph you can also say that dynamic range is what your camera is able to capture with regards to the brightness range of the scene all right so when we look at a photograph and we examine it and we look at the darkest part either the lightest part and then the darkest part what we're talking about is the difference between these two how many stops difference is there is there four stops difference two stops difference ten stops difference that's what the dynamic range of the scene in the scene is all right now a lot of times depending on what you photograph you could simply make photographs all day long and never need HDR but other situations call for for other actions all right so when the camera when the dynamic range is too much your camera can't record detail and let me tell you what you guys this is nothing new this is nothing new this has been around as long as film has been around we've been fighting this problem for as long as I've been a photographer so we have this problem okay so how do we solve it so in this image you can see that I was doing a shoot in this hotel and we can see plenty of shadow detail in here you look down into the deepest parts of the image and we see plenty of shadow detail but the window which we feel is pretty important in this case is sort of blown out so this has got too much dynamic range for my camera sensor to tackle all right I make another exposure now I've got good highlight detail but my shadow detail is all but gone okay that's a problem this is a scene that requires HDR now we started off by saying dynamic range or dynamic range is the difference between the brightest part and the darkest part of your scene well it also refers to what your camera can capture as far as the tonal values that will record detail so if we look at what's called our indicated exposure meter inside of our camera you'll typically see a zero to a minus one minus two most cameras stop there plus one to a plus 2 and again most cameras stop there but more expensive cameras will often come with a plus two and a plus three well right there is what we call our latitude or our dynamic range from 0 to plus two and zero to minus 2 those are what in film we used to call them the textural zones meaning they would record detail but not everything of course fits into those zones right so when we're looking at our indicated exposure meter in our camera which by the way you may not see that you have to put your camera to that manual mode to get that if you have it in aperture priority or shutter priority you may not see this this meter so it's important to shoot in manual because this is going to be our guide ok so right there's our textural range our five stops on either side now you may hear you may have read that some cameras have a much more extended dynamic range have you all heard that well that's true to a degree it's also somewhat of a manufacturers claim I don't know if you all ever does it is anyone in here old enough to remember zest soap right ok so what was the commercial for zest soap will not leave a film on your body it's the only soak that ever left the film on my body I don't know how they get away with this but this is the what they do right so I'm not saying that kind of a Canon do that no Procter & Gamble of course but um by the way I don't know if this was made by Procter and Gamble but um but sometimes they like to stretch the truth a little bit that's all I'm saying and while some cameras truly do have some higher dynamic range like the d800 really shocks me you can definitely get plenty of detail down here in 2-3 with the d800 maybe even a little bit further for the most part we want to stick with in this dynamic range because when we start digging down into these values what we're pulling up is sort of the sort of the dregs of the barrel right you're gonna end up with a lot of noise and it's not going to be very pleasing information that we pull up all right that's why I like to kind of still teach it the way we always taught it with film it being the five stops of latitude or five stops of dynamic range okay anything above that folks is going to end up being pure white with no detail or pure black with no detail okay now primarily we're going to use HDR to capture the full tonal range in the scene the reason I say that is because HDR can be considered a bit of a fad I know a lot of people I talk to all say well you know you might want to use HDR for that oh I'm not going you know that's not my thing I don't do that it's not it's not so much of a fad it's not so much of making your image to look like a cartoon or super grungy although you can do that that's not really my style my style is to try to bring it back so it's realistic so it looks like what I saw when I was standing there right we all we all pined about the or you know we're all concerned about the loss of film and how wonderful film was well one of the things that we liked about film was it was kind of realistic right and with digital we can manipulate it so strongly that we can get very very far from from reality so my goal with blending images to HDR is simply capturing all of the detail that was in the scene now I'm not trying to make it look like a cartoon I'm not trying to make it look grungy it's not my style doing that is quite simple you don't need my help with it's far more difficult to actually make it look realistic okay so kind of capturing the whole tonal range that's what I'm looking for so here I run a workshops down in Zion we always take a day trip and head down to Antelope Canyon in Page Arizona because it is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and but the the amount of dynamic range in there is so severe so that when I expose for the shadows like the image on the left the highlights are completely blown out when I expose for the highlights on the right the shadows are completely black there is no way you can capture this in one frame one exposure cannot do it right so it takes multiple exposures if I remember correctly this was either six or seven exposures I'm not quite sure and so these are two of the images that I shot out of a series and then I blended the entire series together to get this now we have detail in the shadows and we have detail in the highlights but I think what's equally important about looking at this image is noticing the fact that the shadows are still dark as they should be the highlights are still bright as they should be one of the biggest problems and we'll see this when we start processing images one of the biggest problems is that people compress the tones so much that there's no more dynamic range left we want to keep a bright highlight we want to keep a dark shadow we just want to show some detail that's exactly what that place looks like when you stand there all right so our first step our absolute first step is going to be hey do I even need HDR you don't need HDR in every situation so what are some of the tools that we can use to determine whether HDR is required histogram for one right you guys histogram is a great tool so does this image and its accompanying histogram tell you that you need to shoot HDR here no what we have is we have the I'm part of that dear the bottom part of that histogram coming right down into the left corner and the other part of the histogram coming right down into the right-hand corner this is telling me that I have got plenty of detail throughout the entire image no reason for HDR here how about that photograph yeah do you think we need HDR there look at the histogram no we don't yep so it looks dark in here but I think even with this even with this the light on in here we can see yeah you can see plenty of detail in there right people right in the shadows and highlights as far as highlights go there's not even any really bright highlights in there look at the corner of the histogram the right-hand side does not yet even reach the corner of the histogram so this scene requires no HDR whatsoever and this is a really I think this is a really important thing to pay attention to because a lot of people will get into certain situations and they'll just think oh I have to shoot for HDR I've got a bracket you know when you'll just do it out of hand and that's just not necessary so really ensure that you need it before you get started right we'll come back to metering and how this is done in a little bit all right so to keep things simple I'm gonna show you a couple of different ways to get the proper exposures to blend together in HDR let me tell you the way that you don't want to do it you look at a scene and you say whew that's really contrast II Auto bracket click click click click that's what you don't want to do how many of us have done that before yeah only me am I the only one oh ok it was kind of like yeah yeah a little bit um yeah we don't want to do we don't want to do that folks because that doesn't that doesn't ensure us that we will have the proper exposures and the way that I'm going to show you to blend them together having the exact right exposures is paramount to this process and when you get those right exposures creating a realistic HDR image piece of cake piece of cake so getting the exposure is a very very important part so one way we can look at this for all the people that want to set your camera into Auto bracket mode and you want to do spot metering and all this fancy stuff hang on to your whatever that expression is and we'll get to that here's just the really super simple way to do it okay first of all step up to the scene take a shot do your highlights look good nope they're blown out okay let a little bit less light in take another shot are they still blown out okay no problem let a little bit less light in then when you come up with your shot that has got good highlight detail that will be your start let's just give it a number let's just say one 500th of a second okay next thing you're going to do is you're going to open up by one stop and here folks you're going to open up on your shutter speed not on your aperture okay because the shutter speed well let's put it this way the aperture will has the possibility of changing the depth of field in your image and you don't want to do that of course the shutter speed may change motion but HDR is not really designed for shooting sports anyway so open up on your shutter speed okay and then look at your shadows do your shadows look good mmm no still a little bit dark no problem open up again deer shadows look good no okay open up again one stop every time and do that until your shadows do look good so in this way you may end up with two photographs you may end up with four photographs or five or seven or nine it doesn't matter how many photographs you end up with it only matters that you've got the series with one of the shots good for the highlights and one of the shots good with the shadows and you're doing one stop in between change by the shutter speed all right that's all that matters so here is a an example series the very first shot I took is good for the highlights and you could see detail in that stained glass and you know from standing in in such a place that it's really easy for them to get super bright white but I shot so that my highlights looked good then I took another shot lower left-hand corner of course the shadows have brightened up because I have opened up a little bit then upper right-hand corner opened up a little bit more and then a little bit more and finally when I got to the lower right I thought okay that's good I see I see detail here I'm in good shape now those are my four shots and then I'm gonna take those four shots and blend them together in HDR right so let's look at the histograms that go along with these images alright so this is the first one notice how that histogram is not quite touching the edge it's very close from touching the edge on the right-hand side so the right hand side is your highlights and the left hand side is your shadows so in this image we can see we have good highlight detail but our shadows are no good that's all right that's our first shot okay then I take another shot I open up by one stop okay now my shadows are starting to creep up the right hand side in that histogram I'll take another shot open it up again one stop ah a little bit more detail now but still touching the left-hand side and then I shoot my last shot and now you can see where the histogram comes down into the lower left hand corner now I feel that I've got all the detail that I need out of these four shots then together we take them blend them together in HDR for the final image alright so here is the same sort of image again I'm looking at my histogram so this is the first shot for my highlights my highlights are good here you can see the white of the building we can see the detail and the bricks there that's all looking quite nice and the histogram accurately represents good highlight detail does everybody understand that that represents good highlight detail okay excellent so from here I open up one stop on my shutter speed and shoot and then I open up another stop on my shutter speed and shoot and then suddenly okay this is it I've got it now I've got shadow detail but notice how I have not made my shadows so incredibly bright that they've become mid-tones I don't want to do that I want to keep that sense of realism as we look at this we know it's darker that's part of the game so we take those three images and blend them together and then ultimately you end up with what you what you've got so we're keeping it real folks we're keeping it real by having this area remaining darker and this area remain brighter that's the key all right now that is the simplest way to shoot if you guys didn't know anything about metering if you didn't know anything about manual exposure you could take the shot look at the histogram if the highlights look good open up a stop shoot open up a stop shoot open up a stop shoot you could do this thing all right that's not the that's not the absolute best way to go although it's perfectly fine a better way to go would be to pre calculate the the exposures so that you know oh yes I need from a quarter of a second to a eighth of a second of fifteen thirtieth sixtieth and one 125th those are my six shots because then what you can do is you can set your camera up to shoot those shots using your auto bracket mode you can put your cable release on you could step back from the camera and just go click click click click click now you're not touching your camera you're not running the risk of moving the camera in between exposures all right and that's about the best way to go and if you have motion like a lot of times I'll shoot where the clouds are slowly moving across the sky and so I think hey if I can shoot very quickly it'll be fine but if I take my time and click and you know then I'm going to get that ghosting so a lot of times what I'll try to do is shoot them as rapidly as I can which means setting your camera to the auto bracketing all right so what I do is I use manual exposure and I use spot metering so in a scene like this what I would do is I'd step up and I'd say okay well what's what's my mid-tone in here blue sky is kind of an average tone so I'll put it over the blue sky and then notice the hash mark on the bottom right now it says minus two so I wrote tape my shutter speed dial until it becomes at the zero points everybody understand what I'm saying now I'm in manual exposure mode okay well I'll probably shoot this at a fifteenth at f8 let's just see what happens all right now I'm gonna take my spot meter and I'm gonna put it over the highlight area that I want to have detail and the hash mark moves up to +2 I think okay well that's within my dynamic range all right and then I go down to the shadows and it goes down to minus two do I need to shoot HDR here I don't the shot is fine I could just shoot it at a fifteenth at f/8 there's no problem here all right so using the spot meter I'm going to learn whether things are too bright or too dark I can place things where they belong so what if we step back to make this image look normal what happened was I put my spot meter over the blue and called that average by zeroing out my meter okay now when my spot meter goes over the white with detail it's at +2 we've already are we just determined that this is gonna be a fine exposure for the shot agreed everyone so couldn't I say then if I ever just put my spot meter on a highlight it should be at +2 absolutely yeah so I could put my spot meter I could have started this off by putting my spot meter on the mountain putting that at plus-2 and I'd come up with the very very same exposure so this is how I work I find the brightest highlight detail that I want to have you know the brightest highlight area that I want to have detail I'll put my spot meter over and put it at +2 okay so let's see how this rolls in an image like this what I would do is I would come down with my spot meter and put it over the bright tones now what I'll do is I'll manipulate my f-stop in my shutter speed or one or the other until it says plus two at this point is that window going to be within the dynamic range yes it is and it's still going to be bright because if I put that at zero what would that window become it would become an average 15% gray that's not what a window looks like to us a window looks bright so it belongs at +2 okay then we end up with a 15th at f/8 okay so then I'm gonna meter my shadows so I'll take my spot meter and put it over a shadow area but I don't want that to be zero do i people I want that to be a minus two so I'll manipulate my f-stop and shutter speed and come up with a minus two now I know I have to capture a fifteenth at f/8 and eight at f/8 a quarter f8 and a half at f/8 that's four stops that's four shots and those will be the exact correct shots to get a very realistic blend what I want to do next is I want to go into the program that I'm gonna actually show you how to use that program is called photomatix Pro all right some of you may have that some of you may not have it if you're interested in getting it then the place you buy it is from HDR soft calm okay photomatix pro from HDR soft calm this is the program that I like I've tried lots of different programs and it's the one that I feel is the easiest to use and creates the most realistic look so if you have individual questions about why I don't use your program I can't really answer that this is just what I've you know come to come to use okay now if you do purchase this get the pro version that will work as a plugin to Lightroom and aperture and Photoshop whatever other programs that you're using okay but also you're gonna get a chance to put in a coupon code if you put my name in capital T capital C then you get 15% off so instead of being $99 it comes down to $85 all right now the other thing before we move on is this book while we're just taking notes here the recent book that I have is the realistic HDR image and that you can purchase from peach-pit Press you guys it's a it's a it's an e-book it's eight dollars it's 85 pages in length it's absolutely complete check it out okay peach-pit press realistic HDR image okay so lightroom you can work it with a plug-in right so I'm gonna buy HDR I've got it and I get the Lightroom plug-in with it you can get it with the Photoshop plug-in aperture program plug-in so on and so forth but now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start all my work and finish all my work in Lightroom okay how many of y'all here are using Lightroom okay almost everybody how many people are Photoshop users a few well that's about just about the rest of you so for for Photoshop users you're going to begin your work in Photoshop Camera Raw ACR right Adobe Camera Raw now all the images are almost all the images I'm going to demonstrate here for you guys today are JPEGs the only reason that they're JPEGs is I've downsized them and turned them into JPEGs so the processing goes faster so you're not watching my computer churn but when I'm work my images it's always going to be taking the raw images and bringing them into into photomatix okay so let's start off pretty simple we've got these three images and let's just take a peek at these three you're going to see that this first one is the good shot for the highlights right the clouds look nice all this ends up being really really black now I know what some of you guys are thinking I could feel it all the way up here I can feel it I know what you're thinking you're saying hey there's some detail in there I could pull that up inside a Lightroom yeah you could you could but it's not gonna be great detail you guys and it's gonna look grainy and noisy so try to resist that temptation so what I did was I opened up a stop and then I shot this photograph I'm a little bit more detailed then I opened up and I shot this photograph and this represents what I want my shadows to look like so there's really no reason for me to lift up these deep dark shadows that do not look very good to be as bright as this one I could just make the exposure for that capeesh we're good alright now just to give you guys an example of that let me show you this example here this is a photograph where I could I could come in here and actually take my shadows and brighten them up right so if I was to do this thing and I take my shadows and I brighten them way up and maybe take my exposure and brighten them way out you know what that's actually gonna be too dark so let me use another example let's say maybe this example or this one that's even better all right see how the shadows are still dark here but I could take them and brighten them up a whole lot what I want you guys to notice is look at what happens to that detail in there do you see that that's what I'm talking about when I say you're reaching down to the bottom of the barrel and pulling up the dregs it just doesn't look very good that's why I want you all to resist the temptation of just cranking up your shadows and making them a lot brighter all right so let's go then back to our first three images that we're going to blend together and there they are what I'm going to do is in order to invoke photomatix I'm gonna go to file plug-in extras and export the photomatix Pro this this set of directions will of course come with photomatix Pro they'll tell you where this is going to be but that's how you're finding this particular plugin okay now after that you guys I'm gonna be using the shortcut that I created for this so I don't have to go through that step every single time but that is under file plug-in extras export to photomatix Pro now once we get this heading into photomatix Pro we're met with an intermediary box that says hello Tim what do you want to do with these images and let's just zoom in here so we can see this a little bit better you're gonna see that the first option is align images and it's checked I think that's mighty nice of them thank you yes I would like you to align my image assistant I always leave that box Jett you're gonna leave it checked as well now the next box down is for this gentleman who doesn't like the tripod and that's you could choose you can choose your hand-holding or you can choose taking on a tripod and this is a little bit different you guys they're using two different engines to align the images one assumes that it's only going to be moving you know one way or the other and the other the taken on a tripod obviously it can be anywhere so it's a little bit more of a robust sort of algorithm that put them together but if you're on a tripod just go ahead and choose the tripod one okay now next one down show options to remove ghosts we'll get into that well we'll come back to that a little bit later all right next option down reduce noise well this is entirely up to you folks I try to always shoot as much as I can at a low ISO 100 or 200 so I almost never check that box okay if however you are hand-holding you know and you're trying to just grab this shot you're set up to 1600 Y then you might want to have photomatix reduce your noise okay I prefer if I had to fix my noise I would prefer to fix it in Lightroom first one of the greatest things about photomatix this program is that it it allows you to make adjustments to your photographs before they go into the photomatix program not all HDR programs allow this thing so this is a really big benefit as far as I'm concerned so what I'll do is fix the noise on all of the images equally in in Lightroom then send them into HDR okay and the same goes with chromatic aberration says reduce chromatic aberration right here you're gonna want to ensure that you fix this somehow chromatic aberration is where you have when you have light passing through a piece of glass it's ultimately going to break up into its different colors and then hopefully those colors are refocused to the exact single point on your sensor if they're not you get a slight misalignment of colors and that will result in like a little pink edge or a little green edge and because photomatix and the HDR process are so dependent upon really good edges that that chromatic aberration can just get exacerbated by the program so I always fix all of my chromatic aberration before I ever send my images into into photos into HDR so these two are going to be largely dependent on whether you fix them first okay I fixed them both in photos or in a Lightroom so there's no reason for me to check those boxes okay coming down automatically re import into Lightroom library sure that sounds like a good idea that means I'm gonna start in Lightroom go to photomatix fix it in photomatix and when I hit save and re-import it pops back up and Lightroom for me awesome ok next down file name well you can change the file name if you want I don't largely irrelevant you can do whatever you want there does not matter okay then down here we have output format 16-bit TIFF well our choices are JPEG 8-bit TIFF or 16-bit TIFF we know what JPEG is right that's gonna be a compressed file we don't really want to get into that we may want to make alterations to our photograph afterwards so JPEG no good all right TIFF 8 or tip 16-bit well there all you have to remember if some is good more is better give it 16 you know that's gonna be a nice rich file filled with information that will withstand plenty of other adjustments back in the program ok so once all that is set this remains sticky folks which means this is going to be just this way when I come back in next time so I'm gonna hit export and Lightroom is off and running and it's gonna bring these images together alright now this is our work environment for for photomatix here we have a thumbnail strip here we have our image window and here we have the ability to make adjustments now this thumbnail strip can be it could be tempting it could be like a bad drug you guys you want to stay away from this thumbnail strip right you don't want these sorts of images this is that fake painterly look that we don't want so these are just simply presets that for the most part are god-awful all right so probably the smartest thing that you can do is soon as this screen opens is go ahead and just close that out get rid of it get rid of it people you don't want to look at it alright now what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna hit this fit screen so now my image is is full sized in here okay let's get that away because that is just devastating all right now in HDR what we have once we get into the HDR program folks what is actually happening is it's taking the files that are coming in and it's putting it into a much bigger space what's called a 32-bit space and at that point you've got all the information in your file you've got all the information in your file but we now have to place it into visible tones does that make sense to you guys right now here's this huge dynamic range that we captured but the camera can only see this much well guess what that's what prints can see and that's what your computer monitor can see too it's pretty close right but we have all these tones so now that they're in this one big file we need to make the bright a little bit darker so we can see them and make the darks a little bit lighter so we can see them basically what we're doing is we're mapping these tones into a new space how does that feel and we're mapping them into a place where we can see all of the tones all right that's called well tone mapping now there's two ways we can do this there is an actual button up here called tone mapping and then there's the button down here that says exposure fusion let's just go through this really simple you guys I want to make this as simple as I can for you guys tone mapping bad tone mapping scary alright now watch this exposure fusion good exposure fusion warm welcoming easy to understand [Laughter] now what I often like to do when I'm blending together and I'm being facetious of course because there is times for tone mapping for some people but if you want to create the realistic HDR image tone mapping is going to be far more difficult to achieve that goal alright there's some advantages to it but not for what we're talking about today alright now what I often like to do is just look at Lightroom behind my image and look at that you guys don't they look remarkably similar except I now have detail here where I didn't have detail before that looks just like the real deal over here there's no cartoon element to it there's no grunge element to it it's just what it should look like and that's what exposure fusion can give us all right so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit exposure fusion and then I'm gonna go down here where it says method defaults and I'm gonna click on that and that's gonna reset everything to those default settings for exposure fusion now let's take a peek the clouds look a little bit brighter than they do in the darkest image and the shadows look a little bit darker than they do in the brightest image so we're close I haven't done anything yet by the way except for hit exposure fusion defaults but we're close and that's the way it should be that's the way it should be alright so now we have the opportunity to make some changes but before we make some changes why don't we go ahead and look at a histogram so I'm gonna go under view 8-bit histogram and looks pretty good doesn't it guys that's what exposure fusion does it tries to give you a really natural-looking histogram okay that doesn't mean that we can't press it that doesn't mean that we can't make some extra adjustments so the only downside I feel to this particular piece of software and indeed all of the HDR software out there is that they really name these things it's like engineers are naming them like the photographer's are not naming them you know so they don't make sense to us we don't have any strength slider in Photoshop or Lightroom all right we don't have a brightness and a mid-tone slider that's confusing to me those are the same things all right so we've got to work through these a little bit and it's not that hard think of strengths as being you're sort of your master fade so the effect that we're trying to do here you guys is darkened down the highlights and lighten up the shadows that is the effect that we're trying to do agreed all right now all of these other sliders that we're going to use are going to affect where those tones go now as a whole set of those sliders this will increase all the power of that or decrease all the power of that so this decreases and increases everything below it okay so a little bit strange that it's at the top but there it is all right now the main things that we want to think about truly are our highlights and our shadows and then our blacks and our whites now I don't know why they just didn't name this highlights and this shadows and this black and white it would be much easier for us but they didn't so the brightness really affects the highlights and the mid-tones so you can see if you look at the histogram as I make changes here the brightness is kind of working on those highlight values can you all see that all right the mid-tones tend to work on more of the shadows and the Midtown's see how the highlights are not being quite as affected all right then the black and white clip will actually just move your deepest blacks and your brightest whites so those are the four settings that we're going to play with so in this case I might want to maybe brighten up my shadows just a little bit here so I might take my mid-tones and pull them up a little bit and you can see it really doesn't affect the highlights that much okay then I could come to my brightness and move that down just a little bit and that will darken down the sky now none of these did exactly what I want so now I'll take the strength and push that even further and now you can see what's happening right the shadows are brightening up okay now in this image that's just about all I would do but if I wanted to move this section of the histogram over that would be my black clip makes the deep blacks blacker and unfortunately there's no way to move the bright whites any darker because the only thing they're gonna do is make them whiter and that's something we don't want all right now this is a very very important point that I want to get across to you all if you do nothing more than open this image hit exposure fusion and hit method defaults and that's all you did and then you hit save and re-import right here you'd be way ahead of the game way ahead of the game now let's see what just popped up back in lightroom let's go to the develop module here and let's see what we've got okay there's the image that we just blended together all I did was hit exposure fusion and default and now if I feel like my highlights are a little too bright we know where that is you guys just take whoops I think that's the wrong image there we go all I have to do is take my highlights and move them down a little bit if I want my shadows a little bit brighter I move them up a little bit and that's it the thing about this is is that photomatix has done such a good job of blending and keep this keeping this real looking that even if there's just a few subtle changes that is so easily done back in Lightroom our back in the raw convertor back in Photoshop too many people try too hard to get it exactly right in photomatix and it takes a lot more time and it's not always intuitive right back here it's super intuitive but because we're sending it back as a 16-bit file it's completely resilient to such subtle adjustments no harm done whatsoever okay so let's look at a few other images you guys let's go to where are we here yeah all right let's go to an image like this here we have our four images and you can see that once again this is very very common for me I'm shooting at the early and late parts of the day where the shadows are really soft and the background is under some really nice Setting Sun okay one photograph is not going to contain all the detail so I'm going to take these four and blend them together so what I'll do is with those four selected I'll go file plug-in extras export to photomatix Pro this is all the same so I'm not going to make any changes here because it's sticky so I'll now hit export it goes into Photoshop aha what is this well what's happened here you guys is photomatix is a little bit confused because it recognizes the fact that I have two of the shots at the same exposure okay and it says two of your images have the same exposure information according to the exif metadata Tim that's what it's saying and at this point it this can alert you that you've grabbed the wrong images to bring in do you see what I'm saying and that's why I put this up here now that being said if you make mistakes in the field as I did on this particular image I missed a stop and so what I did was I took one of the images and duplicated and then darkened it down a little bit so that I would have the four stops that I wanted okay but the main reason I wanted to show you that is that you can actually make a mistake in pulling the images in and it will certainly alert you to that fact okay so let's bring those images in again and we'll hit export and we're just going to go ahead and say okay to that and we'll blend these images together alright so once again I get rid of that nasty business over there and I hit exposure fusion and method defaults and I think you guys can see that without doing really anything else we're pretty darn close to where we need to be colors are a little bit saturated that's something we can take care of later it's not a problem alright but you do have color saturation here that you can move down a little bit if you feel like that's something you want to do alright so if you bring the right exposures in the blending in here is going to be effortless that's the key that's the key but yes I could bring up my strength that's gonna darken down my highlights open up my shadows I could bring my mid-tones up a little bit if I felt like doing that and you always have your histogram to guide you right so it looks like here I'm not even getting any very pure whites right so I might take my white clip and bring that up a that and that may give my image a little bit more openness make it feel a little bit more brighter a little bit more bright rather and then same thing with the black clip I can even bring that down a little bit to get that contrast going so once again let's look at this and then let's look at method defaults and they're just subtle little tweaks in there you guys right subtle tweaks I could easily accomplish that all of that by hitting save and re-import and going back into Lightroom to work on the actual image and there's that image and if I felt my shadows needed a little bit of lightening up I go to the develop module and I lighten up my shadows until they feel like where they should be okay if that green feels too saturated to me I can come down into my saturation in my HSL panel click on my direct selector button click on that green and just desaturate that green only make it feel a little bit more realistic all right okay so let's look at a few a few other images here bringing the right images is so incredibly important okay so here I've got three images the first one I think looks good for my highlights second one looks good for my mid-tones and probably my shadows and this one well I don't know that just feels a little bit too bright overall to me so let's take these images and blend them together in photomatix and see what happens when I hit exposure fusion and Method defaults the image feels too bright doesn't it you guys now I could go and mess around with this and that's us they're certainly welcome to do that or you could also follow my lead when I run into a situation where it doesn't work right out of the box I just quit I am a quitter the problem here you guys is I think that this is too bright and if you add something and that's too bright or something then that's too dark it's going to influence the mix so now let's remove this and just blend these two images together and I think immediately we're going to see the blend is going to be much better so Fusion natural and Method default and there you have it and you can see that it already looks much more realistic agreed everybody alright so I saw your hand back there just wait one second and I'll open up the questions um likewise well know likewise that's it put the right images in and you're gonna have a much easier time and working with it now once again I'll just go ahead and hit save and re-import back here and this will pop up inside of Lightroom and we'll move to that image and there is now if I feel my highlights are still a little bright oh well I'll just go to my highlight slider in Lightroom and bring that down a little bit and and maybe my shadows there looking pretty good let me let me go back up to these highlights here and drop them down a touch all right you guys is that making sense so now it's just a much easier way to make it look realistic alright now as I mentioned earlier one of the things that I like most about photomatix is that it allows me to make changes to my images beforehand I find that the adjustments that we can make inside of Lightroom or the Adobe raw converter are very intuitive we understand what to do there however I think as you can see they're not incredibly intuitive inside of photomatix so let's take these images here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually reset these to ensure that these are all reset to where they should be and we'll look at these images with slot canyons down in Page Arizona and you can see the one on the left has got highlight detail I think we can all agree on that the one on the right has got plenty of shadow detail okay so in theory this should be an absolute perfect blend look at this look at my high like detail here you guys look how good that is right and then I go to my shadows and look at that plenty of shadow detail here all right so let's blend these together and see what happens all right fusion natural exposure fusion and Method defaults alright my whites look a little blown out there that concerns me alright so let me take my brightness and pull it down some oh man as much as I pull that brightness down I'm not really getting too much more detail in there especially since I'm gonna have to go back with my mid-tone and open it up I'm meeting resistance I don't like it you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna quit seriously that's enough if I hit me if I hit that much resistance I'm done I don't want to play I don't wanna play around with it so now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go back into Lightroom and I'm gonna take this darkest image that should have good highlight detail in it and it does and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into develop module and I'm simply going to take my highlights and bring them down just a little bit and then I'm gonna bring my whites down a little bit then I'm gonna go to the next darkest one and I'm going to bring those highlights down a little bit and those whites down a little bit alright now let's read lend this so file plug-in extras export to phone Maddux Pro and hit export photo Maddux is recognizing the changes that I've made to these images and it's incorporating in it into the final blend all right so now when I hit exposure fusion and method defaults I don't know I think we're already on our way don't you guys look at that I'm still retaining highlight detail in here if I take my mid-tones and brighten up their shadows a touch I still have some highlight detail in there I could bring my brightness down a little bit and maybe even increase my strength and now we have greatly altered the scene and retained that good highlight detail all because we just went back and did some pre adjustments to the images before they came into photomatix does that make sense everybody that's the primary reason I like this program right there so let's take this example here here we've got image where I've got good highlight detail out here and then all the way to good shadow detail in here right now if I blend all these together in photomatix let's see let's see how this comes out very noisy out there six images yep now the truth of the matter is you guys is that this image here is probably too dark for the outside okay so I hit tone mapping and I hit defaults just to see what happens all right do you notice how bright it is in here and how dark that is out there that doesn't look realistic and it doesn't have a nice wide dynamic range to it so when we go to exposure fusion and then hit method defaults immediately it feels much darker in here as it should we know we want that feeling of being in this tunnel looking out and I would say that that's even pushing it for being darkened down too much in my mind that's a little too dark alright so what I'm gonna do is quit because you guys know how much I love quitting and gonna go to the grid mode and I'm gonna pull out that darkest one which is this one that was at one second so I'm gonna pull that one out and then rebloom them together any day now all right now we hit exposure fusion and default and now this is brighter that's starting to feel more realistic to me all right I'm gonna take my my brightness and make this even a little bit brighter like that and then I'm gonna open up my shadows just a little bit with my mid-tones now I feel like because this isn't a dark tunnel I really should have some snappy deep blacks right I want some good deep blacks in here so I might even take my black a clip and move that over a little bit now would you agree that that feels like you're in that tunnel looking out so it's the idea that having this area be too dark having our brights being pushed down so far that they become a mid-tone it starts to lose that sense of reality okay so in this case I ditched the darkest one and then some subtle manipulations in here to make it feel better alright so ultimately what we have to ask ourselves you guys is when we're looking at did I bring it in here oh shoot I don't think I did when we're looking at an image in HDR what we want to do is we actually want to try to use our words to figure out why things look fake right so I'm gonna go ahead and blend these four images together looking right into a sunset and let's see what happens here if we go to tone mapping and hit method defaults here why does that look fake you guys can anybody tell me look at the highlights yeah first of all the highlights yeah the highlights here are as bright as the foreground that's insane that would never look that way also look at how saturated this is highlights are never that saturated that's not the way we see the world and also it's about as dark here as it is like right over here the Sun doesn't work that way it's always gonna have a glow that fades off right so when we go into exposure fusion and this one I didn't quite make enough exposures to make this right but if we go into exposure fusion hit method defaults that look at how that sky looks different you guys it's brighter here it gets darker and darker and as it gets darker you start to get more saturation that's in the highlight values the shadows are clearly way darker than the sky well that's pretty natural but let's take the strength on this and crank it up and let's take our mid-tones and brighten them up some and that is going to be a little bit closer as to what it looks like right now I gotta take notice how my histogram here you guys does not show any deep blacks right here you generally do not want that so let me take those blacks and move those over a little bit now that looks much more like the scene as if it was shot on film and the camera was capable of capturing at all now of course you can stylize that a little bit more if you want no problem but we just don't want to push it to those degrees that we saw when we first opened it that's gonna be the problem so a lot of times just examining that and asking yourself why does that not look real what how does it really look in real life those are the kind of questions that once answered will help you guide you know guide your image making in here alright so let me show you a cool addition to to Lightroom here or I'm sorry to photomatix a lot of a lot of photographers were asking for a way to work with their architectural images so the folks over over at photomatix kind of fixed it up so let's take these three architectural images and let's blend them together in photomatix now here you can see we have really bright highlights right well let's hit exposure fusion and method defaults and we don't quite have the highlight detail we want now let me take this and instead of fusion using fusion natural which we have been using let's go to fusion real estate now look at how the sliders have changed you guys these sliders to me are a little bit more intuitive shadows/highlights oh I get that right if I want to darken down my highlights I could pull my highlight slider to the left if I want to get more contrast or detail in the highlights I can go highlight depth and shadows will lighten or darken the shadow areas so this can be very helpful when you have a lot of open windows and you're viewing to the outside right because I'm starting to think that some of these images were adjusted and that's why that example didn't turn out as well as it should have did I know they're all right there okay but at any rate I find that with exposure fusion you get more control over the shadows with Fusion real estate you get more control over the highlights so let's look at these four now blended together in Fusion real estate what aha see it gave me a warning I was probably trying to choose something I already blended images do not have the same width and height you know what that makes me sad let's see what's happening here I probably cropped one and didn't crop the other oh look at that yep that's the one that shouldn't be in there alright so let's take these three images and blend them together now I just made a whole brand new folder and I'm hoping I didn't grab the wrong images I think have aah here we go No okay so Fusion natural method defaults and then watch the highlights Fusion real estate method defaults you see that you guys now we actually have more control over helmet without dark we can make these highlights so if I bring my highlights down or up look at how much they're changing you guys watch the depth this gets really crazy look at that all the way up to there or all the way down to here so with the highlight depth and the and the highlight slider you have a lot of control over exactly how bright you're going to make your highlights now that being said I find we have a little bit less control over our shadow area like we did in infusion natural so now what I've done is now that they've come out with this version I'm tending to use the Fusion real estate when I need more highlight control and fusion natural when I need more shadow control makes sense people okay one last thing before we make this a wrap let's see how ghosting works here I've got this series of images where I was photographing in this bar and the bartender has moved you can see the three different positions that he's moved in if I blended these images together I would get a little bit of ghosting in each one so we can avoid that and this is again one of the major reasons I use photomatix this is far superior than what Photoshop does so let's take these three images and blend them together into photomatix but this time before I go any further I'm gonna choose show options to remove ghosts and then click export all right now I'm gonna get an intermediary screen where I can say this is the ghosted portion sit and here you can see this is the ghosted portion right you guys so you can see the arm moving and this is generally undesirable so it actually tells you right what exactly what to do here drag your mouse over the image to select the ghosted region oh okay very well let's do that thing so I'm just gonna drag a little circle around the gentleman and now it says control click or right click to mark it as ghost it okay so I'm going to right click inside and Mark selection is ghosted okay now if you're following the lines down step one step two step three would be to preview your d ghosting and that's what it's gonna look like pretty sweet right you guys now we can just simply click OK and now this is going to get sent back into photomatix proper and we would continue with the blending process just as we've been doing all afternoon so let's try this one last example here we'll return to Lightroom and let's choose this one and here you guys can see that once again I seem to have this problem with unruly waitstaff right there moving all over the place in here bloody hell what's going on here alright so here they're just a big blur here they're kind of blurred and kind of still but this that's the shot I want because the guy with the red tie is kind of still on the other guy's moving that's giving me the sense the feeling that I want I want some still some motion so I want that particular image all right so let's blend these together show options to remove ghosts click export and once again we come to our screen and we're going to circle the area now I got to go way out here because there's some movement out there as well all right now the only thing is can't just deselect this and that kind of bums me out because I wanted to grab this area as well so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna mark it as selected and then right-click again and remove selection so that's to me a something that could be addressed and fixed but let me make my circle a little bit bigger there we go now I feel like I've got that whole entire area okay so we right-click inside the selection market as ghosted now if we go back again we could set another photo for selection and here they are it's saying which one do you want to use and it actually by default chose the one I wanted but it very easily could have chosen another so if I wanted a different one I could go to the zero and when I preview d ghosting it gives me that I don't want that so what I'm gonna do is go to return to selection mode and right click inside set another photo for selection and choose that one and then hit preview D ghosting and now I've got the ones that I wanted in there all right so once again we click OK and we get in here into into exposure fusion and we can make the changes as we see fit let me go to fusion natural and method defaults and that's pretty good I might want to open up the shadows a little bit there with the mid-tones but that's about it looking looking pretty darn good alright so not only can we can control the tonal values but we can also control what area we can fix for for being ghosted and like I said I have seen plenty of other programs that do not work as well with that ghosting this one works quite nicely my book actually covers all of this and a lot more so it goes into all the pre settings that I do in Lightroom it goes into how to how to spot meter you know things that I just touched on in here it goes into much more depth than that and then of course multiple multiple examples on how to process your image in photomatix oh and also it shows you how to blend it in Photoshop and then bring it back to Lightroom to do the tone mapping which is another option if you don't want photomatic seniority on Photoshop how many people own Photoshop in here but don't own photomatix only a few people okay just so you guys know you can alright okay I'll show you then that's fine let's just do it let's just do it we'll do it okay okay you can take let's say these three images or let's go back to all those four different sizes what image do I want to do all right let's do these oh so this be good I'll take these images that we saw and instead of going into photomatix which is heresy as near as i'm concerned but that's okay let's do in photoshop we're gonna go to photo edit in merge to HDR pro in Photoshop all right now these six images are now going to go into Photoshop and we're gonna have Photoshop do the blend but we're only gonna allow Photoshop to do the blend we're not going allow it to move our tones like we're allowing photomatix to do okay there's only one trick that you have to remember with this we want to keep this image in a 32-bit form alright so you can see it's taking a little bit longer got six images Photoshop is chewing away at this and we're gonna get to a place where we're gonna set the white point and we are going to decide how it's going to be output okay so at this point what we're seeing is a true and real 32-bit image which means I cannot see all the detail in here because it hasn't been tone mapped yet is everybody with me on this it hasn't been tome app this is basically Photoshop is just aligned them into a 32-bit file that's it so what you can then do is take your white point and pull it over until you feel like your highlights look good which very typically is right at the end of the histogram all right I can fix that later now here excuse me here I want to choose 32-bit and click ok and again this is all outlined in the book so like I said to repeat myself at this point Photoshop is just merging the images together and putting them into this really big 32-bit file we're not allowing it or allowing us to make our changes to what it should look like at this point ok now when we come back into Photoshop the trick is going to be just to hit save and close and now when we do that it'll return to Lightroom ok so I'm gonna hit file save and then file close and it goes back into Lightroom and here it is so question is is which now these images actually do look like one another but this one says edit TIFF this was JPEG jpg JPEG jpg JPEG so I know this is my 32-bit file everybody with me alright now check this out you guys this is like magic alright if I go into the develop module and let me just pull this back down here and I'm on my 32-bit image when I go to my basic panel suddenly these controls are gonna have so much more control over the image because it's a 32-bit file now I can take my shadows and I could really just crank them up right or I can take my highlights and really darken them down or really brighten them up and in this way you can just do your tone mapping so to speak here inside of Lightroom so if you already own Photoshop you could just say listen Photoshop do me a favor take these images put them in a 32-bit file register them and then let me save it and close it and bring it back to Lightroom and I can do all the adjusting and Lightroom it's a really nice way to go if you're not going to use photomatix alright all right people that's all I got whether you're a hobbyist or a professional vnh has the answers to your questions experience a world of technology at our new york city superstore connect with us online or give us a call our staff of experts is happy to help

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 182,180

Keywords: pro audio, HDR photography, HDR, high dynamic range, Event Space, BH Photo Video, bhvideos, bh photo, photo, Tim Cooper, BH Photo, video, photography, B&H

Id: NeG9Wm0-yXw

Length: 75min 6sec (4506 seconds)

Published: Tue May 20 2014