well lookin at those pics above, u definitely know what ur talkin about..
still incredible to look at

The result is so bold but great to look at. In my almost 3 years here I bet I've seen those HQ shots over 100 times in one form or another but those are like seeing it for the first time! I have to believe that's what Jim Jannard seen in his head when he envisioned his palace

Nick, thanks for this tutorial. Some amazing results are to be obtained with some simple actions.
I downloaded the trial and started to experiment somewhat whith excisting photo's.
One thing I do not quite get from your explanation is this: "For the overexposure, I'll drag the rightmost anchor in the "levels" dialog so that it's 1/3 of the way to the right-hand side. etc..."
Where do you do this? In Photomatix? Or is that in Photoshop? If that's the case, do you know of another trick to edit the exposure of excisting pictures? (Just make 'm darker and lighter?)

One thing I do not quite get from your explanation is this: "For the overexposure, I'll drag the rightmost anchor in the "levels" dialog so that it's 1/3 of the way to the right-hand side. etc..."
Where do you do this? In Photomatix? Or is that in Photoshop? If that's the case, do you know of another trick to edit the exposure of excisting pictures? (Just make 'm darker and lighter?)

Thanks for the heads-up to that ambiguity. Yes, I do this in Photoshop (and put that bit into the tutorial I wrote above). If you need a free solution, try out GIMP. I don't use it, but I hear it's the bees knees for free photo editing software.

But whatever you use, I recommend a levels or a curves adjustment, and not simply a brightness adjustment. Exposure and brightness aren't the same thing, and making changes to the latter won't yield good HDR.

Thanks, had to do some experiments with this Gimp, but I found it. (I'm a real goose with photo-editing)
Now I'm gonna play a little with Photomatix before deciding to buy it. The results look promising, even for me... :o)

Is the H.Q. open on the weekend? I just moved down here and wanted to check it out today or tomorrow.

open on Saturdays, but not on Sundays

thanks, have to wait till next weekend then!

Guys, it's great to see you helping each other for tutorials and stuff, but that has nothing to do with Airborne's visit to HQ. If there isn't a thread about this yet, feel free to start a new one. But let's keep each thread on topic please.

Thanks.

Well, it's no skin off my back -- I'm happy to have the thread's topic wander. But if you think it's deviated into the realm of an OT thread, that's another story.

Like any technique it can be overused or pushed to an artistic extreme, but I've been able to use it to capture what your eyes do on their own. Normally a sky will blend nicely with the forground since your eyes contract to adjust the light based on the focus. Cameras can only handle one setting for the whole picture. So based on the below pictures, one is underexposed to allow the sky detail, another overexposed to get the forground detail, and then one baseline shot to gather details in between.



Combine and presto, an image that gathers what we would normally see. Add a little contrast for effect and hopefully the shot comes out nice.

Do you take 3 shots (and combine) or only one (and photoshop then combine) ?

I take three so the detail information is present in the entrire range. Using one shot may work like this one:



but as you see, the hilights in the clouds were clipped. You can overcome this by shooting in RAW, which contains more range information, but if you have a very bright area and shadows, then it's best to hold still and snap three shots. My canon has an option that will do that for me, so I don't have to play with the controls to take the three shots.

Ok, thank you very much. My poor camera don't make RAW, so I'll use my tripod to try.

Great work, Dann. Looks like your HDR skills are progressing nicely. The bracketed example above is your best one to date, IMHO, although the saturation is still a bit high for my tastes. One thing I had to learn was to turn the saturation slider DOWN in Photomatix, because adding contrast in PS brings out the colors anyway. If you go overboard with saturation in Photomatix, the scene tends to look a bit fake, but some people prefer that style.

The last picture you just posted (generated from a single shot) suffers from some ghastly halos where the cliffs meet the sky. The ways to get rid of the halos are:

1) Careful burning/hue change of the affected area (using an adjustment layer and a paintbrush)

2) Use a layer mask on the HDR, and bleed in the original image from underneath

3) Don't go so crazy in Photomatix (Luminosity and Micro-contrast seem to have the biggest propensities to make halos).

I tend to use methods 1 and 2 more than 3 :-) For example, in the truck picture at the very top, there used to be an ugly halo where the sky meets the building. I could have toned down the HDR, but I liked how the truck pops, so I just burned out the halo to make it match the rest of the sky.

EDIT:

Looking at your last posted shot again, it looks to me like bleeding the original in from underneath would be the best bet -- that way you could recapture the bright whites in the clouds (which Photomatix turned grey) as well as get rid of the halo. Use a large, soft brush (hardness=0), and paint small areas at a time. It's nice to keep some of the sky in HDR, since it'll bring out some details that will wash out if you just repaint the entire sky with the original. You'll want to use a harder brush to define the sky-cliff edge, or just repaint with the soft brush, and use the polygon selection tool to delete out the areas where the cliff gets repainted.

Thanks for the tips. I have about 500 photos from the trip and tons of HDR's to churn through, so I'll go back at some point and do a better job.