This is my first attempt at an HDR photo. This was taken in my back yard, with my Nikon D40x, using a tripod and manually dialing in the multiple exposures.Here is one of the more normal originals:
I'm trying out the trial version of Photomatix, but the trial version adds watermarks. I had to erase those out and touch up the image. I hope that with practice, I can do more of this type of photography. I've found a great website that deatails HDR photography. Check out some of his outstanding work at www.stuckincustoms.com
The "Stuck in Customs" guy was who first got me into HDR. I love it. I use Photomatix, as well. Do you have Photoshop? If you do, in the recent versions, not sure which version it first appeared in, there is HDR support, though I haven't yet played around with it. Also, another recommendation, especially when shooting subjects that tend to move slightly, shoot in RAW mode. You can then adjust the exposure up and down at whatever stop you want. This allows you to create a HDR from a single file and not have any problems often found with bracketing, such as camera or subject movement.
ReplyDeleteThanks Aaron. Yeah Tray Ratcliff (Stuck in Customs)does a great job with his HDr photography. I can only hope to be that good one day. For this photo I followed his HDR tutorial to get a feel for how difficult it might be, and found that somethings, I had to do some additional internet searching. For example, he goes into photoshop masking, and my version of Photoshop Elements 7 doesn't have this redily available. But I did find some great tutorials and videos that show how to work around this, and it worked perfectly. For this photo, I took 5 RAW pictures, with the standard +2,+1,0,-1,-2 exposures. I like your idea though of just taking one RAW and then making different exposure copies to eliminate any movement that might occur. I'll have to try that next time. I also wanted to try and see if only 3 different exposures gives any less definition than the 5. What have your experiences been?
ReplyDeleteI completely forgot I already made the suggestion about shooting in RAW. Sorry for being repetitive on your most recent post.
ReplyDeleteEarly on, I played around with a variety of ways of doing it. I did a 3 image bracket on my camera, compared that to a 3 image bracket from 1 RAW, and a 5 image bracket from 1 RAW (my camera does bracketing, but only 3 at a time; wish it did 5). The 3 from 1 RAW was obviously not as good as the other two. But those two were fairly comparable. One thing I've noticed is that increasing the exposure on RAW often blows out the highlights more than doing it in camera. And on darker areas, there tends to be more grain when working from one RAW. But otherwise, they are pretty close.
What I need to go try out is manually doing 5 images in camera. I'm sure that would give slightly better results, especially in the extreme highs and lows.