Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Process HDR

So let's look at another shop mind, which is this one? Just make a little bit bigger, right? So this is the same monument this'd inside this building. Kind of if you walked out through, You can't see the doorways here with doors that go out, and then you're on this kind of balcony outside. There's a huge big building. I'm fantastic to photograph. It was the big hammer and sickle up on the ceiling, lots of detail, the roofs falling down these things around the But we're almost aches. So handcrafted little mosaic tiles, the sort sides on a kind of historical interest. You see the gap there in the middle. That was where Todd or give off. Who was the Bulgarian Socialist president lived after the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism collapsed in Bulgaria? Will allegedly. The polit bureau came on, chipped his face off the wall. It's a kind of, you know, some religious leaders, their historical figures, but total give office. It's a complete outline of his face, so cut Someone just raised hi...

m from this building with the fall of communism. But anyway, it's fantastic. Building up in the top of a mountain the first time I went there with a friend of mine, we thought we had to park at the bottom, kill themselves, walking up to the top to find another car park way. Didn't make that strike twice. But this kind of looks like an HDR image, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, I'm going to show you because it's not was is a fair few adjustment less on. Let's turn off some of these. Turn those things off on what 10 days was off on. All of those off on will turn all of those off. Now, one of the things will discuss as we go along is sometimes HDR. Techniques don't work very well on. You can never intel tell quite what went wrong. I imagine anyone who's trying to produce an HDR sequence occasionally you'll have the whole sequence of shots that should work. When you take into Votomatic attendance first shop, it just ends up either looking like you don't want it to look or you just can't quite get the balance right. And this was This is kind of one of those shots. That's what I did here was started out with, um, I don't attorney's office well sequence off 11 exposures, so there's kind of one of them a little bit smaller on. This is one of the kind of the brighter images screams out the way as well. Okay, there's when the brighter ones. So what? What we're missing here? What detail is not there? The highlight. Yeah, we kind of lost a lot. The highlight detail and this is kind of areas that where the roof is broken, not kind of supposed to Windows. It's just broken bits of roof, so we'll ignore that one. So what I did was add in incrementally other exposures. So there's a darker exposure if I turn that layer mask off, so I'm gonna shift, click in the lame, ask you just to show you there's a darker exposure. So by bringing that one in, I'm repairing some of the brighter damage, and I've done that with a mask. It's that kind of looks like a ludicrous to come forget mask on, but I suppose it easy in some ways but kind of painting in where you want this. Let's have an effect and then kind of working through. So there's another one on. There's the lame ass for that one. There's another one, and you can see kind of It's gradually building up. So kind of a small Elaine. It's new on, and yet another on There's the mask for that one. And let's just skip that one on. Go go to the last one on the lamest there. It's just that it's a kind of that's the warm for the very brightest detail. So I turned that mask off on old click it Fanteni off again. Um, no, Yeah, yeah, that's the shops. I was thinking it was a mask, but it looks like a mask because it is actually so dark. But that is one of the shots from the original exposure sequence. It's a kind of to get the detail in those brightest windows. That's what the rest of the scene looks like. You know absolutely nothing there. It's completely black, and that's blended in with the mask that looks very similar. It's a kind of what you do then is you build up these layers manually. So the shooting the shooter exactly site. You're telling him down you're looking, making sure that you should say my seven so on. But blending the manual it. It's an extremely time consuming process on working out the masks that you need contact forever. But I kind of wanted to get the shot right and couldn't get it looking right for automatics broke. So all the XDR techniques, they're not magic. They don't always work very well. I did process these, but I wasn't entirely happy with the result. This is kind of the same as I've mentioned about the guy. Just interiors on. I'll try and remember. His name is we go through the day. He's kind of given up on this whole issue of trying to get an HDR look exactly right. So what he does is go through a very time consuming process of shooting multiple exposures that different white months is different exposures on during this process and manually blending together. That kind of makes sense. Yeah, So I'm not advising this, but it is an option. Um, and if you like playing with masking, and I think probably this talk maybe about four hours to do from start to finish, so kind of kind of a lengthy process. Can you Sorry a lot of your answer. We have a second sight about whether you're gonna press the bottle. Not that kind of went wrong. That So Anyway, this is kind of what you end up with. Lots of detail on you can see there's lots of adjustment lives up there as well. But what kind of talk About Lights Room. Okay, so that's one example. We're not gonna look at the example. If you signed up for the course, you've got the example for that image. But we'll come back to that a little bit lighter. I want to show you something else. First talked about movement on. I want to go through a sequence of images on. We can start talking about how you get these images interactive magic probe. I will come back to finish up a little bit later. But we've got what, about five minutes left, I was going to show you one. I think it's quite useful with Votomatics probe, So I was gonna drag these onto Fota Matics Pro. You can just load up the program Andan asking to brings for files on it will like much. But I was gonna drag them all on its asking that on emergent for HDL process nor open them so I'm gonna emerge for actually are processing on. There we go. So there's there's the photos now. This is probably the button that most of you haven't clicked to. The show Intermediary 32 bit hdr image just kind of. It's only intermediary in the sense that you start out with some raw files and you're aiming to get somewhere else. It's a good idea to save the XDR image in the middle, because then you don't have to go through this whole first process again. So if you decide you want to practice again or you want to use a different program to process the XDR file, you generate it once and then save it. We'll talk about that when we get it, so it's gonna take out Keanu. What I get is a serious of pre processing options. Let's let's go through these how far we get before the break, but about five minutes to go, So a line source images thistles. A good idea. Even if you shouldn't on a tripod, you get one pixel out of alignment. This is going to affect the clarity of the final image so you can align your source images And if you do that, then you want to select crop lined images to If you don't, what you get is kind of the images will be. They won't overlap all the edges, so you may as well if it needs to be. If they need to moved in relation to each other, you may as well crop it because otherwise you just connect it manually. Anyway, you've got to methods of aligning images on by correcting horizontal vertical shifts. That's kind of this kind of phase misalignment on by matching features. So if you tip, you'll know, you know, particularly wide angle lens verticals will change. So typically I would use by matching features on include perspective, correction. Um, it's a kind of perspective distortion. If that didn't work, I would switch to trying by correcting horizontal vertical shifts. It doesn't matter, really when you start with, ideally, you don't need isa, but it's kind of worth leaving home. In case there were any slight discrepancies when you shot sequence right, I think I'm gonna show you first. This removed ghosts what was So why would you get ghosting in an image? We've already discussed this. What are ghosts club cloud movement. Anything that moves between the exposures is gonna be in different positions. So you can't kind You can't sticking together into one explosion sequence because they're out phase on. They looked like ghosts because that kind of transparent in the actually are sequence to kind of, You know, if you got bird in the sky will be three little birds together or seven in a row. Um, you get overlapping the edge of clouds on stuff like that. Now, up until recently, there wasn't greatly could do about this for automatics. Did have an option for removing ghosting, but it wasn't very good on it. Kind of works, but no, especially well. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna leave with selective goat. The ghosting tool recommended selected automatically sometimes work, but sometimes doesn't. It's kind of a waste of time if it doesn't, and sometimes it's easier. Just look at the news yourself anyway, So we're going to do selective be ghosting, right? The removed reduced noise on. Right. This is kind of useful option. You got a choice here. You can reduce noise on all the source image is your normal exposure. And under exposed. Are you under exposed images? Only now why does it give you those options? Why does it not give you the option? Overexposed images only because noise usually shows up in shadow. Exactly. Because the problem if you have noise. And we kind of talked about how to avoid the noise by shooting exposure secrets accordingly. But it is going to be noise. It's gonna kind of come from the under. Exposed to meet is only so you kind of need to make a judgment call with these settings. If you're shooting at I s o. Chances are you don't need to reduce the noise on all the images and maybe you just leave. It is under exposed. If you've up the ice out because he's shooting at night, you want to keep your exposure times down. It might be worth doing all the source images. Another alternative. If you think the noises going especially problematic is running the images through camera roll first or run them through photo shop, correctly noise, their export, miss tiffs and an important tips. At this stage, we're just talking about taking the roars directly into Votomatics Price. Typically, I would select, either under exposed images on normal, normally exposed images. Assuming I'm shooting low, I So yeah, so what? We'll just leave under exposed images. That chromatic aberrations. What are they? It's like purples and greens will come around on it. The edge of a highlight. Yeah, the edge of a highlight or the edge of the image highlights highlights. No purple fringing is not chromatic aberrations. Such what this is referring to. Have you ever done in HDR image with a wide angle lens? The edge? You kind of get green and red bending around things. Have you ever noticed Time? No. Right. Okay. When you shoot with a wide angle lens, you'll get optical distortion on the way in which the light bends depends upon its frequency. I'm kind of quarter in which where it goes, but you get red light bending either too far or too less and green light bending are too far too less so you get a green fringe on one side or infringe on the other. So next time you shoot something like 60 mil lens and you're shooting kind of a building, zoom right in and look at the detail and chances are, you'll notice a little bit of distortion at the edges. Now, the problem with any kind of distortion with HDR images is that the process of tone mapping exaggerates detail. So if you've got chromatic aberration is gonna show up little neon strip lights down side of objects. It's kind of the same reason. If you censor is dirty, when you shoot the image, that sense of the is really gonna show up. It's doing its best extract as much detail as possible. So typically, I would turn on reduced chromatic aberration. Kind of part. Fixes the problem. Yep, white balance. You can kind of set them here. It's not always entirely reliable. I'm just gonna leave these ones as shots on color primaries based upon again I would leave. This is adobe RGB exits a slightly larger colors. Baseness. Aren't you be. Although I could switch to profile to essentially be so one of a kind of one of the bottom two choices here if you work in the pro photo RGB color space, which profile? But we'll leave it on that we actually be on then pre process. So what What this does now you'll see here it's converting image, whatever. So at this stage it's converting the raw files. Um, so it's kind of clicking through fairly quickly, certainly quicker than my laptop would Grant of life got nice desktop machine for me today, so that's going to reducing noise ness. Remember, we selected reduced noise on just the docks, damages that title. All right, I'm gonna ask the question while this is working, why would you choose to reduce noise in Votomatics as opposed to doing it in a shop or later or something later on? Because what the tone mapping process does is exaggerates any issues in the image. So what if you don't get rid of noise from the outset? You end up with a lot of exaggerated noise, which is harder to reduce If you can get rid of the noise before you start, you may not have any noise as you go through, okay. So supposed to going through removing noise on all nine images. If noise is a problem, that's that. That's kind of the last resort is to take everything into first shot first and fix the problems kind of if you shoot on the way I suggested and particularly get in your like to shop light enough noise will be way less of an issue if you're just doing the three shot auto bracket minus 22 plus two. Ah, lot the time you'll end up with night because that's not the optimum way of shooting in HD are sequence If you've got your lighter shot light enough you got this gap left an inch of the instagram you'll find that noise really is in the same issue It all I'm because it's kind of dame to the shooting was Here's an example. This is this is from Dubai eyes kind of the venue reused for the Gulf Photo cross training event. Um, incidently, if you if you've got nothing to do in November, come along to Dubai and some great workshops going on there, What can you see here most this in the middle car? Yeah, it was this thing here. I kind of know Blair e car in the background there. That's if we can zoom in a bit. You can have a close look at that. Um, you kind of see now on this was shot quite quickly, but because these cars are moving, they're just not in the same place. So in days of old before factor Matics got clever. What you might be trying to do now is find one of the original exposure sequences to drop in over the top. When you finish presidents, you're actually our file and trying to get the edges so they look right. And it was it was actually quite difficult. What we can do now is we can use the selective de ghosting tool to pull out the that particular areas. So all you need to do is kind of draw, click and draw around in the area on then right click on dMarc Selection is ghosted area and therefore a preview. The de ghosting. I could do this on land, behold its disc gone completely. So I'll return selection books. There's no problem here, So let's draw around that one as well on well marked that as a ghost area. And we'll draw around kind of this area here kind of awesome modelled stuff there as well. So we've named pick three areas that have ghosting. The rest of the image is fine. No problems. That car obviously was part not moving. I can't see any people moving about some people there that they must have been quite still. So kind of right. We've got those three areas preview de ghosting on. That didn't quite work because we got a gap there. So sometimes it depends what's moved where. So let's get rid of that one. Get rid of that wall on. What we do now is will treat now is one area. So let's mark that was ghosted. Let's preview to ghosting again and there you go. So kind of the problem with the 1st 1 and I kind of knew what the problem was there because there was a gap in the shooting, so it looks like two separate bits. But if we turn to the selection mode, that looks to be a different Carter, that one, isn't it? So that kind of looks like a silvery car. This one looks like a darker station wagon that looked completely different. But it's actually the same vehicle. So when you get the right bit selected, it goes right. Okay, that thing is moving through this right here, and it kind of fix it. We gotta bust there. We've got a car there on. We've got this kind of station wagon thing here, so that's kind off the selectively ghost until which is really handy when things move. It's not so great if you know, if we went to look to the determine the palm trees that were blowing in the wind. It's not quite as good there, but gross Gross has in large objects. They just went well.