Here is another image from that same walk around Temple Square in Salt Lake City a while ago. Notice how the HDR effect really pops out the details of the building. This was actually a very busy day up there. It was hard not to get a million people in the shot. There are a few if you look close. I love the lower round windows the way they lit up.

Yesterday’s post had a number of comments. Today I thought I’d take a moment and look at what goes into making an HDR type of image.

High Dynamic Range photography is all about getting more color and detail than you could previously get into your image. The above shot is the first one in the series of images I used to make yesterday’s post image. It’s a standard exposure of the temple. There are areas where the shadows are too dark. (Pure Black no detail) and areas where it’s too light. (The sun is just white with no color) In digital photography you can have no color at the ends. As people we see color in the lightest and darkest of areas.

So right after the above capture you make another image to capture the detail in the highlight areas, the sky. You can see the sky is looking ok here, but everything else is black.

So right after that image we make an image for the shadow areas. The sky is all but gone and the areas that were completely gone in shadow are now open for us to see.

In years past these images would have been very difficult to combine, even in photoshop. Now we have several HDR tools available to us. I use Photomatix Pro to merge them together. It’s the best one I’ve used so far for generating an HDR image. So you run the three images into photomatix and out comes an image that has detail and color pretty much everywhere. They don’t always look wonderful at this point. The image below is what comes out of the software, with the three above going in, and a bunch of sliders adjusted.

So the last step/steps are bringing all of the images into photoshop, stacking them up together and masking in or out some of the things you wanted to keep from the original images. Making any contrast and color adjustments. Also in the case of our final image, paint the thing to look like a watercolor.

If anyone is at all interested, after reading such a long post, let me know. I can go into detail on the end photoshop step of what went on here. Also I have been thinking about doing a class on HDR imaging beginning (Camera setup and shooting) to end (ready for print).

Here is the final image I posted yesterday. We have detail in the sky, color in the dark areas, a fun watercolor effect, and dramatic clouds. What more could a photographer ask for?
rPix

http://www.cafepress.com/reflectedpixel
Hello all you wonderful people. Check out this sweet T-Shirt. Maybe you aren’t involved in the HDR war going on. It’s mostly among photographers. Some love the HDR look and some don’t. But pretty much non photographers love it. This shirt is one I wear myself. Representing a 5 stop shot.

Just testing the new lightbox setup for wordpress. Thanks to the help of my good friend Jared, who pointed me the the plugins I needed to make this happen. To see what I mean, go ahead and click the image. It should just jump out of the page to show you the larger version. Thanks Jared! Check out his site here.

I’ll also be uploading my images slightly larger than the past ones so we can see them better. Thanks
rPix

HDR Spotting – Gallery of HDR Photos by the HDR Photographer’s Community

I don’t know how long I’ll be on this page but I made it into HDR Spotting.

I finally got an invite to hdrspoting.com. I love this web site, it’s a great place to get inspired with wonderful imagery. They’ve also got links to some great tutorials and all the different software available. Go and check it out.