HDR Photography Beginners Guide - How to Create Realistic HDR Photos

have you ever captured a stunning scene before you only to be really disappointed by what the cameras actually captured maybe you see this beautiful view of a mountain scape and you frame it with this gnarly old tree with texture and to your eye it looks stunning something like this but what is your camera capture this what's going on desperate not to lose detail in that beautiful gnarly old tree you bring up the exposure and brighten things up but then your sky becomes completely washed out the mountains get bleached out into oblivion you think a darker shot may be the way to go so you bring your exposure back down you've all of a sudden got the light right on the mountains just as you want it but now you can't see the tree it's even darker but don't worry there is a solution and that's HDR photography and in this video I'm going to walk you through everything you need to know to get started and start creating great results with a minimum of fuss hi I'm Anthony Turnham and on this channel we focus on helping you become a better photographer and photo editor Photography is a journey so if you want to come along for the ride why not subscribe HDR photography refers to the act of actually capturing all of that information from the very darkest shadows right through to the brightest highlights and then using HDR software to actually combine all of those exposures into one beautiful image that your camera was unable to capture in one exposure why is HDR important well as the example at the beginning of the video showed what we see with the miracle of the human eye isn't always translated to the center in the camera and as great as the camera sensors are today sometimes they still just can't capture that full dynamic range and when the camera is not able to capture that dynamic range as a photographer you're left with that decision you either keep the highlights exposed properly at the expense of the shadows and the shadow detail or if what you're wanting to portray is in the shadows you show that and sacrifice the bright parts of the image maybe the sky and the detail there and in a lot of cases neither of which is ideal you want to showcase what you're actually seeing with your eye so when HDR photography is actually done well it can actually present a more accurate representation of the scene that you were looking at so what subject are good candidates for HDR photography well the first thing you really need to understand about HDR photography is because you're taking a series of photos at different exposures and then combining them into one it's quite a static event you can't really have your camera moving around everything needs to be locked off and the things within your scene can't really be moving so for things like sports and people moving kids running around things like that HDR just really isn't going to cut it so what the photography genres where it really does come into its own well architecture landscapes and travel photography there are a few things where HDR photography really comes into its own landscapes for example you're able to bring the brightest sky and the darker foreground together into a more seamless image sure you can use gradients to bring down the brightness value of the sky when you've got a nice straight horizon but what about in the example that I showed at the beginning wait actually have something more complex like a tree for example HDR does a great job of just merging that without too much difficulty and worrying about masking things out architectural photography is another genre that lends itself so well to HDR photography I use it on a regular basis for my professional clients architects designers real estate agents it's a great way to capture a series of different exposure images and combine them into one so that you can present to your client a really realistic representation of what that environment was actually like so how do you create an HDR photo it's actually pretty straightforward we're going to break it down into just two components the capture of the images and the post-production so the basic premise is simple with your camera on a tripod you're going to create a series of images of differing exposures of the same scene that you're then going to fuse together into one image using HDR software so let's talk about capturing the images so what equipment do you need for an HDR photo basically you need two pieces of equipment your camera and a tripod and that's it you can push things a little further and get yourself a shutter release I recommend a wireless rather than a cable release while this ones are pretty cheap these days so it's a good way to go but if you don't have one don't worry you can use the timer on your camera so let's talk about how we're going to actually capture those photos first of all find a scene that interests you ideally one with a high dynamic range how do you know if it has a high dynamic range well usually you take a photograph of it and the base exposure isn't good enough to capture the details in the highlights and the shadows all in one shot it's that simple so let's talk about getting the shot once you've decided upon the scene that you're going to photograph there's a couple of things just to bear in mind make sure your camera is secure on its tripod and you don't move it throughout the whole series the next thing is that everything in your camera is locked off apart from one thing there is only one setting that changes throughout the series and that is your shutter speed you want your ISO not your aperture your shutter speed only that's the one thing that changes and you can do that through bracketing so once you've got your camera on the tripod and you're focused on the subject that you want to shoot take your camera off of autofocus or switch it to manual focus so that nothing's moving that might be a case of changing it to manual focus on your lens or on the body of your camera once that is done you're able to set up a series of bracketed shots most cameras these days support bracketing so I recommend a series of either three five or seven photographs to capture the range I like to have a middle shot which is what the camera recommends is the correct exposure I like to capture one below one above or two below and two above that way you've got nice even balance so you've got the shadow detail and the highlight detail with equality if you're shooting landscape or architecture chances are you probably want to have a lot of things in focus from foreground to background so go for an f-stop around f/8 maybe f11 make sure that you're a low ISO you don't want to be having ISO 800 1600 or above and having grain digital noise in your photo that's a no-no so now your settings are all locked in you're good to go I don't recommend pressing the shutter release to start the sequence you want to be a hands-off approach so that nothing is introducing any potential vibration into the camera so you can do this in a couple of ways you can either use a cable release or better yet a wireless shutter release so basically you're sending a signal to the camera they're fairly inexpensive these days so that's a great option however if you don't want to spring for one of those just yet and you just want to give this a try to start with what you can do is use your camera's inbuilt timer facility so look into just how to turn your timer on normally that's as simple as turning it to timer mode and then through the menu you can select a delay but basically you just want to be able to press the shutter release leave the camera and then within a couple of seconds it will automatically initiate that sequence of differing exposures okay guys so now you should have a series of images that look something like this but now comes the fun part what we're gonna get to do is fuse them together in HDR software and the software I'm going to show you makes it super simple HDR software has been around for a long time now but it's only until recently that you haven't needed a science degree just to understand what's going on for this reason that I think a lot of people were creating some pretty bad HDR thankfully nowadays that's pretty easy to avoid if you're gonna take your HDR Journey seriously what I would recommend doing is actually getting a dedicated piece of HDR software I've used about six or seven programs now over the years some of them are bad some of them been pretty good but the good ones you still needed to work really hard to bring out the best from the imagery thankfully I found a piece of software that I really loved called Aurora it's able to bring in your range of imagery and straight out of the box before you've made any adjustments it's created a really nice realistic render of all those exposures into one fused image which is great if you don't have a copy of Aurora don't worry just follow along and watch what I do if you like what you see you can actually get yourself a copy with a discount of using eighty Sky ten at Sky ten that will save you $10 at the checkout it really is worth getting your hands on but let's check out what it can do here so as you can see here in Lightroom we've got four different exposures we're gonna bring these straight into Aurora so let's open a roar up now here it's really simple we can either drag and drop the imagery into here or just click open image so now let's navigate to the files we want to use and select them and just click open Aurora loads these up and as you can see we have an exposure value of minus one plus one plus two and plus 4 it will go through a series here of making adjustments here it's making the final touches and there you go but a being better BOM straight out of the box you can see we've got this really really nice representation of the scene which is much more like why I actually saw with my eyes while I was there and I really like this so from here we could export this go file export and actually send that out as a JPEG without doing anything else to it however Aurora has some really really nice tools for bringing out more detail and controlling your image so if you're familiar with Lightroom you'll see everything slider based so you can bring your exposure down or up you can bring your contrast up or down as well you've got all of the usual kind of sliders plus more so one slider that's quite useful is the smart tone and if I bring that down to the left it's actually bringing in more detail around the highlights of the mountains or we can smash out the other way now this is actually it from a programming point of view it thinks it's doing a great thing by adding more detail through the whole image I would say use this very judiciously because that's when things can start to look a little funky and a little fake but you may want to add a little bit in this case because we've got all that lovely detail in the tree and we don't want to lose it there's still a quick edit on this let's bring the highlights down to preserve what we've got in the highlights of the mountains shadows let's boost those just ever so slightly and let's bring the blacks down just so we're not losing any contrast and perhaps we are going just a little dark by looking at the histogram up here so let's bring that bring that exposure up just a third of the stop we can bring the saturation or the vibrance up but personally I don't want to push those too far because I want a more natural look to this HDR clarity is very similar to clarity another slot in other programs if we push that all the way to the right you can see that's bringing in some nicely localized contrast which might be really nice for our tree here because of all the texture we've got you have HDR smart structure which personally I try not to use that too much again it gives a bit of a fake HDR kind of look which is something you do need to be mindful of HDR is a tool where you can push things towards the really extreme artistic interpretations which for some people may be exactly the look you're going for because I do a lot of professional photography my clients aren't necessarily looking for the weird and wacky they want something that's a realistic representation of either architecture or if it's someone looking for a piece of art for their war fur as a landscape print I want that to be artistic yet still be in touch with reality so just be mindful of that when you playing with these sliders HDR microstructure can add just a little bit of detail if you are picking up any noise in your file you can use D noise here we have luck mapping and that's basically you can apply a look straight out of the box glorious I find this quite a nice one and then with the slider here we can actually decrease or increase that and it's really enhancing those blues and because it's a nice cold day I think I'd be quite pleased to leave that image radiance I love love love this tool it's so nice if I push it all the way you can see what it does it gives this nice ethereal kind of glow to the image and I will often just add just a sprinkling of that somewhere around that twenty mark just so that it's got a hint of it if you want to see you before and after you just click that eyeball on the actual filter itself so I like that we'll leave that on polarizing filter will obviously deepen the blues as if you had a polarizer on your camera I don't want to push those too far but we might have a little bit of that HDR detail boost just brings in detail if I push this all the way to the right which I don't recommend as a finished thing you will actually see how that's just really creating a little crunchy detail there which for artistic purposes that might be a great thing for it to play with but personally I just like to add a tiny part of that not too much glow I'm going to leave alone your tone curve you can dive into if you want to but as I say a lot of this it looked really good straight out of the box so you don't even need to touch this I'm just going through and showing you these options for a sake of thoroughness for example you can add a color straight to your highlight so if we wanted to warm up those mountains let's push the saturation all the way to the right just so we can see what we're doing and then we can actually dial in the color that we like let's say we want this nice pinky glow pinky orange glow there and then we just dial it back to a point where we're happy with that you can do the same with the shadows if you wanted to introduce more blues to the shadows to cool it off even further just like with all the sliders I would say try not to take them too far and have a reason for making a change now vignette is talking about darkening the edges or brightening them so what you can do is actually dark and down the edges and we can increase the size of our vignette or decrease it now what I like to do is in this instance I'm thinking is just soften it with a bit of feathering if I turn that all the way you'll see you'll see what this does sorry all the way this way feathering it just softens the edge or hardens the edge of that vignette so we can see here the size of a vignette we can see here how round it is so if we were to go something like this then we feather until it's it's a very more natural fade and then we bring the amount all the way back so it's barely no sabore but it's just leading our eye in towards those mountains even more and I'm going to say I'm happy with that and we can now export that as a finished JPEG so as you can see HDR is not that scary it's not that difficult and with Aurora I think it's super simple now you don't even have to do anything other than just drag in the files you want and it will do all the heavy lifting for you so I'm really pleased with what Aurora did with this particular image but just to show you that it's not just landscapes and not just this image that HDR is a great candidate for there are some examples of other work I just did recently with this software Wow thanks so much for staying with me guys I really hope you've learnt something through this video and I hope it's been of help to you if it has do me a favor give me a thumbs up and put a lot of effort into this video also if it might be useful to other photographers that you know please feel free to share it if you've got any questions about HDR photography or any comments you'd like to leave me please feel free to do so I always read them and they'll always get back to so thank you very much I appreciate it consider subscribing and I'll catch you in the next video Cheers [Music]

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 73,937

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, Post Processing, hdr, hdr editing, hdr software, hdr processing, hdr photography, beginners guide to hdr, simple hdr, easy hdr, high dynamic range

Id: vKHJdstcGVk

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019