HDR

<p>I have a Canon EOS 550D camera. A little while back I heard of HDR photography and fell in love with it. A quick question:<br>

Does using the Auto Light Optimiser setting make any difference in the HDR photos I take (keeping in mind it is 3 difffernet exposures that make up the single photo). Some help on the subject will be appreciated.</p>

<p>Regards<br>

Spencer Van Der Walt</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Your photographs look like HDR to me, they look more in the range of Halo-max an effect using an application named Dynamic Photo HDR 5 a handy tool used for creating HDR photographs. I like your photographs. Here is what I am doing with my HDR photographs. After I add the effect I like and tweak it a bit, I save it and run it in photoshop CS4 64bit. I have the Topaz B&W script tool and further adjust it there adding color with black and white effects until I find the right combination of what I want to see. I Bracket all my photographs from 3+ to -3 since the application Dynamic Photo HDR 5 supports more than 3 brackets. Here is what I did to <a href="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/14580612-md.jpg">Cleveland Ohio</a> on a sunny day with lots of clouds and wind. It was so windy this day warm out kind of, even with a weight on the tripod hook it was hard to <img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/14580612-md.jpg" alt="" width="680" height="378" /><br /> take super in focus photographs as you can see the clouds are racing past and aren't all that in clear sharp focus as I would have liked them to be. None the less the photograph didn't come out to bad after all for a HDR +3,+2,+1,0,-1,-2,-3 bracketing. A lot of the folks here will probably tell you about using lightroom to further tweak your photographs once you have them in HDR.</p>

<p>There needs to be a clarification of what HDR is and is not. It seems to encompass all manner of " art " montages that fall pretty far from a photograph. To me it is acceptable to use HDR to simply expand the dynamic range to convey what the eye could see. So much of what I see called HDR is an artistic interpretation that mostly does not appeal. Of course Ansel Adams did not shirk from advanced darkroom techniques, but it is hard to argue that his images were not appealing. Slippery slope!</p>

<p>Why don't you start Tim with the clarification of What HDR is?</p>

<p>To answer Spencer's question, the<em> "Auto Light Optimiser setting" </em>can help, what you need to do though is play with it, because it does have some limitations to it's functionality. It is also more for the JPEG shooter, unlike RAW which is suppose to be an exact as it gets of the camera's sensor. So if you are shooting RAW it's not going to really help out the RAW shot as much as it will the JPEG shot.</p>

<p>Thanks Duane for your feedback. How do you add color with B&W effects? Do you start with a B&W photo then add color to it?</p>

<p>Duane:<br>

High Dynamic Resolution in my mind means exactly that, using multiple exposures to expand dynamic range beyond what is possible in one image. What comes out of HDR often goes well beyond expanding dynamic range, for better or worse.<br>

Was there such a profusion of altered photographs before HDR came on the scene? I guess if there was a forum for displaying pictures that looked like they had been through Photoshop filters that would qualify. So much of what I see is people taking the controls in HDR programs and using them to achieve effects that do not have any appeal to me. It is possible to use HDR to very nice effect, but I personally don't like garish images.<br>

In the age of digital manipulation it is hard to be a purist, but I see a demarcation line between photographs that convey what we can see and images that are more art than photograph.</p>

I just use graduated ND filters and careful metering. Plenty of dynamic range and natural-looking results.

 

I wish that someone would invent a program would give me the same effect, but automated HDR always looks artificial

to me. If I were more patient, I would layer and mask multiple exposures in Photoshop. Them again, I don't

understand why that relatively straightforward process cannot be automated to prioritize mid tones.

<p>Spencer, you start with a color photograph and use the Topaz B&W Effect to turn it into a black and white photographs, then there are list of tools you can use to enhance the photograph, and a transparency function that lets you adjust some of the it or a little bit it of it or all of it with a slider. Once you have what you are looking for with the Transparency option you can then use a color option to paint in the color you want to see more over such as you want a black and white photograph with a blue sky. So you use the color that is in the sky, adjust the tool so the edge aware is adjusted, then you paint your blue in. I like playing around with the new technology of today. I still shoot 35mm and 120 film medium format 70mm if you will for the correct size. And for digital I love to experiment even when some people just don't have an appeal for example HDR. None the less, everyone has an opinion. Check out <a href="http://www.topazlabs.com/">topaz</a>. They have some very cool free webinars about their products which are free. </p>

<p>If I understand your question ... to add colour to a black and white you have first decreased the color depth to get B&W s ... subsquently you have to increase it again to be able to add colour. These are tools in my editor [ PSP] not sure where they are in PSE/PS.</p>

<p>Bear in mind that HDR is gross and only the creator and their fans appreciate it but the increasing of the DR is done by many in different subtle ways. It is like when I got infected with the clarification bug from PSP for a week or two recently .. I am now safely recovered :-)</p>

<p>PS ... when I read you other closed thread my first thought was if the skies are washed out you either need a polarising filter for 'one of your bracketed' frames [ the most minus one ] or to close down further to deepen the sky .... or am I missing the point with that suggestion?</p>

<p>He was asking, I was telling him what I like to do. There are many other things you can do, I use topaz, if you like to use something else that's cool too.</p>

<p>Here's my stab at the answers to your questions:<br>

1.) I don't bother adjusting the Auto Light Optimizer on my Canon 500D from the default when I shoot HDR. Considering you're combining multiple exposures taking at multiple exposure values, it probably doesn't make much of a difference whether it's off or on.</p>

<p>2.) By overexposure, are you saying that your highlights are blown? In that case, check the histogram on your bracketed shots. If your underexposed (darkest) shot has the histogram touching the right side of the graph (and you have blinkies on your image), your highlights are blown. You'll need to shoot a shot that's even more underexposed to capture detail in those highlights. Personally, I bracket on Av mode at two stops apart (-2,0,+2) and check the -2 and +2 shot. If I need additional underexposed shots, I go down to -4. If that's not your problem, you might be setting the brightness too high in your HDR software. Depending on the software you're using (I use Photomatix personally), there should be a brightness or white point slider. Adjusting these should cut down on your overexposure.</p>

<p>3.) Too "colorful": Getting a good saturation on your HDR images is tough, and the internet is littered with tons of grungy, over-saturated HDR images that make my eyes ache. I find that even if I dial the saturation down in Photomatix, I still often get color casts on parts of my image. For this, I either selectively desaturate parts of the composited HDR image in Lightroom using an adjustment brush or in Photoshop Elements using an adjustment layer with masking. I also find that applying an S-curve to all of my HDR images (in Lightroom) makes the contrast pop rather nicely, and burning and dodging is also very useful.</p>

<p>Finally, there's tons of good additional resources on the net about how to produce quality HDR images. I'd recommend either Trey Ratcliff's Stuck in Customs site or everydayhdr.com. </p><div></div>

<p><strong>Note from a Moderator. </strong> This is the Beginner's Forum. There are different guidelines for posting here and you are expected to read them. A number of responses are specifically not helpful. The OP did not ask what anyone thought of HDR or what people think is a photograph or not. The question is actually quite simple, if you have an answer, try to help. If not, find somewhere else to share your views on things that aren't being asked.</p>

<p>I take you point Jeff and apologise although one could say in a beginners forum it is reasonable to suggest and edge a newbie away from odd crazes and towards a sensible use of the tools available to us, particularly as in this case they seem to be leading him astray. But I will follow your direction and try to avoid in the future.</p>