Lessons
Class Introduction
04:44 2Bracketing
10:31 3How to Set-up Bracketing
02:54 4Tools to Capture HDR Better
02:09 5Scenes for Good HDR
07:49 6Process Images in Lightroom® & Photoshop
10:52 7Hyper HDR Style with Photomatix
11:39 8Post Processing in Lightroom®
07:56Lesson Info
Scenes for Good HDR
Let's get to work. For the purpose of what we're doing here, also, I tend to keep my self organized inside of Lightroom. I think Lightroom's the best way to manage all of these different pictures. I have all of these files here, and just to make it easier for me, I'm going to create Collections from all of these folders cause I'm just starting these out here. Now I have a whole bunch of collections. If you don't know how to create Collections from Folders, you might want to check out the first class that I did yesterday here on CreativeLive cause we talk about that entire thing on how to do that. Let's start with this one. Inside of here I have, it looks like six exposures. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Oh, seven exposures. I love the way these guys look here. I do not love the way they look here. I love the way this looks here. I don't love how this looks here. First thing I'm gonna do I'm just gonna grab all of these images, I'm gonna select all of the images, gonna do a r...
ight click. This was not available before, so I'm gonna go through all three different methods that I use. I'll go through Photoshop. I'll go through Lightroom. Then I'll go through an external editor, so you could see all of the differences. First an easiest one is, in my opinion, Lightroom. Cause you're managing all your stuff there anyway. The files that are produced out of Lightroom tend to be biased towards naturalistic looking HDRs. Adobe's not in the business of trying to make super extremey images. They tend to lean a little conservative on the processing of those files. I think whatever formulas they're using to be able to generate HDRs, they're on the conservative side. If you're a person that likes having realistic looks, then this may be a good start for you. One of the things that I think that they done that is pretty cool is that they have this one section here now called Photo Merge. Under Photo Merge, you can do HDR, Panorama, and HDR Panorama. HDR Panorama is actually relatively new to Lightroom, and I'll talk about that in a second. For now, we'll go ahead and select HDR from the list. I'm going to select that and one, two, three, we're done. That I think is probably one of the first benefits of using this program. I is great. Obviously, full disclosure, this is the brand new Encore Macbook Pro, so it is a little faster than the normal, than other machines, for one. But Lightroom and Photoshop have done a really good job at increasing that stuff. Like I've thrown 50 megapixel files, like seven exposures, and it's like (snapping). It does it fast. What they're doing, if I'm not mistaken, and if anybody in the Adobe team is here, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I am. What they're doing is two things. Number one, they're taking all of the raw information and they're first merging all of the HDRS based on the embedded thumbnails for the JPEGs. So they give you kind of a general idea of what it's going to look like, and then in the background, they start processing the HDR. Just in case you want to be able to do it. The result is speed. If you try to do this with 50 megapixel files on older versions of computers, or if you have tried to do that in the past, what happens is you do it and you're just like "Okay, I'm going to go get a cup of coffee." That's good. And you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and you wait. Then you come back and you look at it and you're like "it sucks". You spend all this time doing nothing, and now you gotta cancel it and go look for something else. That sucked. The fact that you do it faster, I think is a good thing. Because now you don't have to worry about it. Good so far? Okay. Let's take a look at what we have here. For the most part what happens with when you start working with HDR images is it takes, think of them as almost kind of like layers of a sandwich. What you did is you took one exposure, you stack one exposure, stack one exposure, stack on exposure, stack one exposure, and you made a big sandwich. But the sandwich that you made is so big, like the old time Scooby-Doo cartoons, that you can't bite into it. The latitude of the file is of such a high dynamic range. You can't do anything with it. What has to happen is you have to take all of that stuff and go "All right, well how do we blend all of this stuff together in such a manner that it makes it smaller?" Or that we can tome compress all of that information down into a level that we can manipulate it. Generally known as tome compression, or output. That's kind of what happening here. When you take a look at this picture, it goes well all right, this is the picture that you see here. Okay, that's cool. You have a couple of options. All the way over at the top, you have a section called Auto Align. What Auto Align does is it says "Did your camera move during the processing of these exposures?" If you're shooting on a tripod, probably not. There have been times where I wanted to shoot something and I didn't have a tripod. I set it to 64 hundred ISO, set it to two eight, and brrrp, tried to shoot as fast as I could holding it. My camera's gonna move from one point to another during that. I'd like to be able to have the software have a capacity to be able to go "Ahh, let me go ahead and align that for you." Alignment has to deal with if you moved. Deghosting, by comparison, is did something in the frame move? Think of leaves rustling in the air, people moving from one point to another, water, anything that moved within the frame will create something called a ghost. Deghosting is the process by which you can try to stick everything and not have it look blurry. You have the option to specify how much of that deghosting you would like in the picture. Which one of these do you use will largely be to taste. Up to you, it depends subject to subject. You'll also notice that there's a section here called Auto Settings. Click on Auto Settings, and it'll try to do a correction for you. Whether you do or don't doesn't matter. All of that stuff will be manipulated later in Lightroom. From inside of here what I'll do is I'll click on Merge, and I'll talk to you about one of the other things that I think is super helpful with what happens inside of Lightroom.
Ratings and Reviews
Liz Farrell
It truly doesn't matter if this instructor creates work that looks different from what I like to make. What I got from this course were skills I needed to try something new. (In my case, I watched this before doing some interior photography, knowing I would need to use HDR in Lightroom.) RC teaches you how to set the camera up for bracketing and how HDR software works (in Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.) Apply your own creative aesthetic once you nail down these basics and you'll thank him, too.
Wayne
Just what I was looking for. Basics of what HDR is and the basic steps to do it. I do not care yet about making it realistic or not. I can get into advanced features later, but I am strongly leaning towards non-natural, more impressionistic, looks.