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
Hyper HDR Style with Photomatix
The more important part, in my opinion, about working with the HDR side of things is more how to be able to treat the files afterwards. I think it's more important for you to be able to know how to be able to treat the file. Once you work with your HDR, you need to be able to go back in and do toning, and curves, and individual adjustments, and tweaks to the file itself. That, I think, is more instrumental with bringing out the very best of a picture. All right, here's this. I'm gonna do a right-click on this picture, and I'm going to Export. Let's go ahead and use something completely different now. We've talked about Photoshop, we've talked about Lightroom, talked about how easy it is for you to able to do both there. Let's use a third party to be able to do that. Most of the stuff that we were doing now was naturalistic in its nature. Now let's go ahead and try to just take the volume up a little bit more, and see what it looks like. So what I'm going to do is, I'm gonna come over h...
ere, and I'm going to use Photomatix Pro from Photomatix, a company called HDRsoft. I'm gonna click on this, and you're gonna notice that inside of here, it's gonna tell me, all right, well, what kinds of things do you want to do with your pictures, all right? Do you want to align the image? Do you wanna crop the picture? No. What kind of preset do you want? Did you handhold things? Did you put it onto a tripod? Do you want to see a dialog box to be able to remove ghosts? Probably. Do you want to reduce chromatic aberrations? More often than not, I usually leave these off, because I believe Camera Raw and Lightroom do a really good job of removing noise, and a really good job of removing chromatic aberrations, so I mean, you just could do it there. And I wanna be able to take that file, and I wanna reimport it back into the Lightroom library. So I'm gonna click on that checkbox, and what I'll do is I'll add a suffix of the words HDR to it. The reason that I do that is, that way, in the event that I cannot find it, I can always go into the library module, go into the text, type in the word HDR, and anything with the word HDR will show up, so it helps me find these files. Now inside of here, I'll go ahead and I'll select Export from the list. It's gonna spit all of this image out. It's gonna align the pictures, and it's gonna bring you into this one area that allows you to be able to do either automatic deghosting or selective deghosting. Selective deghosting basically says, draw out an area that you think is the problem. And then, once you draw that area, you'll say, this is the area that's a deghosted area, all right? Automatic deghosting just lets you pick one of the guides that you wanna use as a source, and it'll do it for you. For me, because it was on a tripod, I'm not gonna really focus on that too much, but I did wanna show you what it looked like. So inside of here, I'm gonna click okay. And there's the file, which will always look, aah! It's always gonna have that freak-out look, don't worry about it. You're not gonna stay there for very long. You have different options in this one area on the left-hand side. You have something called details enhancer. You have contrast optimizer. You have tone balancer, and you have tone compressor. So there's a bunch of different things that you can do for this file. I'm gonna apologize ahead of time on the monitors. It's gonna look a little different on yours. I'll show you guys some of the stuff when we break. But watch this. First thing that I'm gonna do here is, I'm just gonna grab my strength, and bring my strength to about 100, cause I want (growling), right? I'm not looking for natural here. I'm looking for... I want the volume to go to 11. Once I do that, I'm gonna grab my tone compression, and notice, go up and down. Actually, the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my detail contrast, and move my detail contrast all the way over to the right. I want a lot of contrast. So strength at 100, detail contrast at 10. Then, from here, I'm gonna take my tone compression. How much am I going to do this tone compression will largely be to taste. Notice that as I move over here, you start seeing a lot of highlights, almost getting to near blow-out. As I pull to the left, those highlights start getting pulled in. So take a look at the chrome, take a look at the red part right here in the bumper. I pull this over to the left, that becomes a little darker and gives me the contrast that I want. If I start moving a little to... Like, I like that. I have a lot of dark pictures in my house. My house would be awesome, but you gotta go in and listen to Hans Zimmer. It's just like, it's cool if it's, like, Batman's house, cause it's all these weird pictures and stuff. I don't have flowers and things. It's terrible. My daughter likes it. I think my daughter's watching, so hi, baby. So I'm gonna bring this down, and down, and down, and I want that contrast. However, if I keep moving that slider, you will get to a spot where all of a sudden, it'll start trying to open up the shadows, and it's gonna blow out all of that information. So I'm gonna go to about here. I think that looks pretty cool. Now, lighting adjustments. I look at this as different styles for whatever it is that I wanna do. Which one do I want? I don't know, I'm thinking maybe that one right there. That looks cool. And that's it. Which is the other thing that I think that I hated about this entire process. People would be like, "Well, you know, technically, "when I grab the slider and I bring the slider..." I was like, no, man. Everybody just jiggles the sliders. You just sit around and just jiggle, and you're like, "Hmm, hmm, oh, that looks cool, save it." I use that, "Oh, that's great, save it." It's experimentation, which is what ticks me off sometimes when you see like 400 presets. All you're doing is buying somebody's, "Ah, cool!" (laughter) Don't even get me started. But, okay so far? Not bad? Ten, take your tone compression and move it around, detail contrast 10. You want (growling). You're not going for soft, naturalistic, realistic. I want (growling). So from there, I'm gonna grab my white point, and I'm gonna make the picture brighter by increasing the white point. I wanna make the darkest portion of the picture blacker by dragging out the black point a little bit. And micro smoothing, notice if you move it to the right, the picture loses a little bit of its bitten edge. If you drag it to the left, I don't wanna smooth anything, cause I'm looking for (growling). That's it. Now inside of here, you have saturation, temperature, and some brightness, that you could probably work with. Let's see, do you have some additional options? No, I don't wanna play with any of that stuff. Can you? Yes. Can you control the amount of saturation that you see in the highlights? Sure. Can you control some of the saturation that you see in the shadows? Sure. I just happen to think that I do a better job at that when I'm working inside of Photoshop, or when I'm working inside of Lightroom. So for me, I leave it alone. Same thing with saturation, temperature, and brightness. Now from there, one of the things that I think Photomatix did that was pretty cool, is they added this entire concept here called blending, which lets you come back to an individual image should you need to. I tend not to use it, so I'm gonna walk you through the way that I usually do it. I'm gonna also come over here, once I have this done... Oh, before I do any of that, I'm gonna save this preset, and I'm gonna come over here, I'm gonna call this preset... Yes, fine, fine. I'm gonna call this preset Saturday Garage, and I'm gonna click Save. This is what happens when people do Lightroom presets. They just jiggle the sliders and call it Saturday Garage. Then somebody else'll turn around and go, I'm gonna grab my sliders, drag that up a little bit, and I'm gonna make another preset now, save that, and I'm gonna call that Saturday Morning Garage. (laughter) And then they'll drag the slider down to the left, and they'll go, Saturday Evening Garage. (laughter) And then sell you those 200 presets for 50 bucks, when you could just buy a CreativeLive subscription and actually learn how to do it yourself. I'm just saying (laughing). So inside of here, we have all of this stuff done, right? Easy, straightforward. I'm gonna click on Finish. There's my file. That looks pretty good. I'm gonna save that, and I'm gonna reimport that back into... Oh, good god. My stack. So I wanted to put this inside of a collection, because I have the option to drag it over to the right. And the aggregate of all of these files would not give me this type of texture and control that I would have on this side. Does it look real? No, I don't want it to. That wasn't really what I was looking for. What I was looking for was to try to play around with this, and actually do something that's a little bit more expressive. So when I want to become super hyper-realistic, this is the work path that I do. That's exactly what I do. I do that every single time. There's very few deviations from any of that.
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.