On Saturday I attended a great HDR workshop with the Tulsa Digital Photography Group. Very informative. I learned about a new shooting technique I still need to try, and that software development is on the move. Photomatix may still be king but it’s being challenged by some very capable and healthy competition. While I’m not totally new to HDR, I am a beginner. I’ve worked through tutorials by Trey Ratcliff, Tom Kaszuba and others in the past, but after this weekend, I am really excited about learning it. My goal is to acquire enough working knowledge and experience to use HDR as a tool to make better photographs.
My tastes, at the moment, favor well-blended images with the added range HDR offers without being over-the-top. I tried to achieve that detailed but subtle look on several images over the weekend with various post processing explorations. For this post I selected the scene that required the most challenging solution; otherwise, it’s just a picture. I had to add Photoshop into the process since I was not getting the results I wanted with Photomatix or Lightroom. Usually Photomatix and Lightroom are enough, but not this time.
The first image is the “before” shot, one of the three bracketed exposures processed in Photomatix. It’s the middle exposure. The others flanked it by two stops. I may have had an easy time in post if I had collected more. The second image is the end result after using Photomatix, Photoshop and Lightroom. It took some time and experimentation for an acceptable result to be achieved, but no doubt, HDR helped make for a better image and a truer capture of the scene.
BEFORE
AFTER
