HDR and Elements, Part 1 (Photomatix Pro)
In the first of a two-part article, Matt shows off some of his HDR (high dynamic range) images, talks about how to get good HDR candidates, and shows how to process your bracketed exposures with HDRSoft’s Photomatix Pro HDR application.
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Related Tags: HDR, photomatix
Alex
June 11, 2011 at 6:36 am
Matt,
Thanks so much for making this video. I love HDR and use Photomatics all the time but sometimes struggle with it. Yours is the first video that I’ve found that really explains how to best use it. That it’s not an end in itself but a step in the process. I’ll look forward to Part 2.
Alex
Michael
June 11, 2011 at 11:42 am
Matt – there seems to be a lot of debate about HDR from a single camera image – creating overexposed and underexposed versions from a single image and then feeding the three into HDR software like Photomatix. Do you have any experience with this, and does it compare with three camera images?
Rick LePage
June 13, 2011 at 11:26 am
Michael,
I’ll forward this on to Matt, but I thought I’d weigh in on the topic, since I’ve done a bunch of stuff along these lines.
The difference between using three versions of a single image and three bracketed exposures can be pretty great, especially if there was a lot of dynamic range in the scene you photographed. This is because each exposure is very specifically targeting one aspect of the scene: highlights, shadows and midtones (I’m being simplistic, but that’s the general idea). You simply have more data to play with when working with three (or more) tuned exposures.
That said, I’ve seen some decent HDR images from single-shot scenes, especially if you’re not trying to get too crazy on the effects side, or if you had a fairly balanced scene to begin with and you nailed the exposure.
Hope this helps,
Rick
Larry
June 29, 2011 at 4:15 pm
I’ve been using PhotomatixPro for some time now and love it, especially since they’ve added a preset gallery where you can see a preview of your preprocessed image in various HDR formats prior to processing. It appears that these tutorials were made using an older version of the program, since the preset gallery was not present.
I would also like to point to an error Matt made in saying the HDR processed image should be saved as a 16 bit tiff file. That would be fine if you were going to post-process in CS5, but not in Elements…Elements can only deal with an 8 bit file.
Greg
June 30, 2011 at 3:56 am
I’m excited! Digital SLR photography is a new world to me. HDR is just mind boggling to an old fart like me. I can’t wait to get out there and do my best. And, I’ve just downloaded Photomatrix. Can’t wait for the second instalment.
Gina
December 15, 2011 at 1:56 am
Great video. Glad that you included info regarding type of photography suitable for HDR from your portfolio. Taking baby steps by purchasing Photomatix Essentials.