Lessons

Lesson Info

HDR

We've talked about using Kamerad to adjust single images and to adjust a series of images like for a panorama. Remember the ones with lions that I ended up station together. But I want to show you how you can get a wider brightness range by merging together more than one image in this. Any time you shoot more than one shot and it varies in brightness, then that process and that and result is known as HDR. HDR is high, dynamic range, high dynamic range is where I take a shot like this one, and here we're rather lacking chatter detail. And the problem is, I could've just this and Kameron bring out that shadow detail, but it would look noisy. That's where all the noise is hiding so I could take this shot, take another one that's brighter up to two stops brighter and take another one until I just keep going, taking more and more shots and tell this dark area here. It's easy to see the detail in it. I would keep my aperture setting consistent so that the depth of field is the same. Any shot...

and I'm just very my shutter speed. I could do that with auto bracketing. Then I can take those images and merge them together. He had the advantage over working on a single image. Is that main thing is you're gonna have nice, clean shadows instead of really noisy looking ones. The other thing is, sometimes you can get a lot more out of your image. Let me show you first that you don't always need HDR, and it's mainly if you need clean shadows. So here is a very long bracket of shots I took in a slot canyon and I'm just gonna make sure I don't have any adjustments applied to them yet. And I'm gonna open those in camera if I want to adjust a single image. And it happened to have bracketed so I could pick between some. What I would do is look over here at the hissed a gram, and I would go for the brightest image that doesn't have the highlights blown out toe white. So here I can click between these this one. The highlights aren't blown out. There's no spike there. So I could find that wants to bright See the big spike on the right means we got a lot of white so I could pick an image like this one, and let's just see what we get out of it. I'm gonna come in here and say are blacks. You see, we have solid black big spike here, so I'll bring my blacks up, see if I could get that spike to go away. Yes, I can. Then to see the detail in the shadows, I'll bring up the shadows slider. Then as a whole, I might be able to bring up exposure. Just goes, any time, the images, a whole looks, dark exposures where you go, start seeing when I get there. I would like the sky to show up more sobering My highlights down you bring exposure up even higher highlights down further. Then I could make this a little bit more colorful and maybe exaggerate the textures with clarity. Okay, I can get something out of that. But look at what the shadows look like. Look it Yeah, you see, that is just full of noise, and it just doesn't look overly smooth. I can't see any of the texture of the sandstone that's here because I Seymour noise than I do that detail and so I might be able to bring out some of that detail. But this is not the most ideal way of doing it. So I'm going to go back to the camera defaults in what I did when I was in the situation. As I bracketed my exposures, I had varied the brightness of them, keeping the aperture setting consistent and very my shutter speed him on a tripod. So I made sure I had one where the sky was not blown out back and tried to get the sky a little darker than white. I got that. Then I kept going brighter and brighter in brighter, these air somewhat out of order. And I kept going brighter in. What I did is I didn't stop until I could easily see detail in the dark part of the picture. So here I can easily see detail in our part of the image, right? And then I know I have enough shots. I don't know if I went beyond that. Looks like I went one step beyond. I don't really need that shot because I could already see the detail here. Then what I would do is before I combine these images together, I would hit the select all button of top left of camera and I would make certain adjustments. What I would do is adjust the white balance, see if I can get it. So it looks the way I'd like it to with white balance. And the main thing with white balance is this is making all of the images consistent because they might have varied in white balance. So even if I thought the white balance look perfect, I'd move the slide of the little last bit and then move it right back to where it waas because it sets all the theme images to the same setting. I would must likely come in here and go to lens corrections in get rid of chromatic aberrations because we don't want those little colorful edges around things I might go to lens profile. Incorrect for any lens distortion Depends if I want that or not. This is with a fish eye lens, so it's gonna be a considerable amount of distortion and I have to decide what version I want. I'm actually gonna leave that off and then I'm gonna cook. Done. Next thing I'm gonna do is with those images selected, I'm gonna choose tools, photo shop, merge to HDR Pro, and it's gonna take a while because those are a lot of images. So while that's taking a while, let's talk a little bit more about HDR. I use HDR whenever the brightness range of the scene is extreme. So I have really bright sunlight directly falling on part of my scene. And I have a dark shadow somewhere as well. You know, some casting a shadow. And if I had tried to shoot it with a single shot, either the bright part of the image gets blown out solid white. You know my camera. I have it where it blinks. If that happens, I call it the Blink ease, but it's not. It's the highlight warning setting in your camera, Um, but either I get that or I can't see the detail in the shadows. If that's the case, I'm usually going to be bracketing my shots so that I can capture the full brightness range. I set it up for auto bracketing on a camera canon camera that is in the menu system, and it's called E B stands for auto exposure, bracketing and when you turned on, you can tell it how many shots that should take and how big of a difference in exposure there should be between them and for the majority of images. For most people, you could get away with taking three shots, two stops apart. So I set it up that way. That's how I end up shooting it. And if I find I really need to get shattered detail out of an image with shadows really dark, I know that I can probably work with a single file and came a rob shadows Gonna look noisy Might not be ideal eso If I really want clean looking shadows, I'm gonna do the process. I'm showing you here I go into camera first, make sure the white balance setting is relatively consistent between the shots. E n I get rid of chromatic aberrations and I might correct for lens distortion those air, the general things that I'm changing. After doing that, I go to the tools, menu and bridge. I choose tools Photoshopped and then, um, merge to HDR pro. And that's what brings this up is a Yes, it is. I would tell you, though, in CS five, you're not gonna be able to get the quality that you'll get out of CF six at all. Nowhere close to it. What will happen in CS five. You'll get these sliders that show up and you'll be limited to these sliders for adjusting your picture, and you can get an okay result. But I find that it would be better to use 1/3 party plug in the plug ins that I like for HDR UH, are there's three of them. The 1st 1 is called Photo Matics. Photo Matics is from a website that is called H D Are soft as in software dot com. That's hdr soft dot com. It's called Photo Matics. I would use that one if you want the most control, and you don't mind some of the sliders having somewhat technical names, No mind. Spend a little bit of time learning it kind of thing. Second choice would be from Nik Software. That's N. I. K software. It is HDR effects pro HDR effects pro that has very user friendly sliders in that the sliders are pretty obvious what they do based on their names. So if you're only gonna do hdr on occasion. That one would be real nice, because with Votomatics, you're going to forget with a lot of those sliders to because their names were not quite as straightforward, even though you might have more sliders. Bacon, you know, find tune your image Maurin Photo Matics and then the 3rd 1 which I havent used in a while. But I remember really liking the end results that came out of it is from a company called Unified Color Unified Color and the product was called Believe HDR Express. It was hard to get a non photographic looking and result out of that software with a lot of the other software. You can get results that look kind of illustrative where you people ask, Is it a photo? Whereas with that software, it was always obvious it was a photo, it wasn't going towards illustrative side. There were very few sliders, so it was relatively easy to use, especially if you don't do it all that often in that kind of stuff. So those are the three pieces of software I use. I find I mainly use Votomatics and Knicks HDR FX pro. With that. I know I have a discount code for Photo Matics. It's on my Web site. My website is digital mastery dot com. That's digital mastery m a s T e r y dot com and if you click on the resource is tab. When you get there, that's where you'll find equipment discounts. And I know I have a discount for photo Matics. I don't remember how much or anything there's other discounts there for other products that I use. You should be aware that some of those discounts, but not all of them paying me money if you use the discount code. But I will never post a discount code of for something I don't use every day, you know kind of thing in Photo Matics. It's one of those. There are other discounts there, like the ones for the Wye Valley cards. I don't get paid a cent because not as important about that. I just know you guys don't like paying full price. I never do so anyway, if you're in CS five, when you do this, you're gonna be presented with these sliders and you'll be limited to these sliders for adjusting your picture In photo shop. CS six. There's a new feature. That is amazing. I love it, and but it's weird how you get to it, and I just want to make sure you know how so the way we got to this is I selected my images in Bridge. I went to the Tools menu at the top of my screen. There was a sub menu called Photo Shop, and I chose merge to HDR Pro. It worked on the image for a while and then presented me with this. If I have CS five, I'm gonna play with these sliders until the image looks as good as I could get it, and I'm gonna click, OK, if I have see a six. On the other hand, I would not suggest that. Instead, I would suggest doing the following set this little menu that says mode 2 32 bit when you do all the sliders below will go away. Setting that the 32 bit mode means we're not gonna process it right here. You're gonna be able to process it using some other software. You don't have to do it right here. If there's anything in your scene that was in motion. If there's a tree and it was windy. It's moving a little bit. There's a person walking through your scene. If there's any kind of motion at all, then you want to turn on a check box called Remove Ghosts. Otherwise, you're going to get doubled images wherever that that movement was happening. This image, I don't believe, had any movement in it because there's nothing that could move in there, so I don't need to have it turned on. But when you turn on remove ghosts, another thing will happen, and that is down here at the bottom, where you see all the little thumbnail images. One of those thumbnail images will have a green border. At least it's green on the Mac. I don't know if it's different on Windows, but if you turn on removed ghost one of them will have a green border. And that's the master image that it compares to all the others that says, if anything is moved from this frame compared to the others were going to try to get rid of it in the other frames. So that means you can click through the different frames to move the green border, and it's gonna give you a different looking and resolve. So most the time when I'm doing this, I'm only emerging three images and if there's any movement in there, I turned on remove ghosts and I click between the three images at the bottom. Let it update the preview and see which one looks best as faras wherever the movement goes. But we don't have any movement in this one, so I can leave. That turned off and I'm just gonna click. OK, so remember most of time with HDR, I'll have three pictures. This is a massively extreme example of HDR. We're looking up to a blue sky, which is really bright, and we're at the bottom of a slot canyon, which is probably 25 feet underground, with really skinny walls where the light can't get down there. So this would be like shooting in the middle of a train tunnel way into the tunnel and go looking out the end. I mean, it's ah brightness range that is usually very impractical to photograph the full range. Is there a way to apply the removed us too selectively to a part of image, for instance, say you're shooting the landscape of I don't know Waterfall friends, since you want the water to be smooth removed us there. But the trees to be tax sharp. Eso his question in general is is there a way to apply the ghost removal selectively? Right In photo shop only. Think not that I can think of offhand in photo Matics? Yes, In photo Matics you can when you're merging your images together, you can draw around an area to say this is the area that you should pay attention to that kind of thing and you're gonna have a lot more control there. So if you're gonna do hdr Ah, lot, I would suggest getting photo Mannix would actually suggest you do is get the demo version of photo Matics and get the demo version of Nick's HDR FX pro trying both and see which one your brain connects to interface wise. So this is the end result it gave me. It looks terrible because it hasn't been processed yet. It's like looking at film that comes out of your camera before you send it through the processor. And now what I need to do is save this, so I'm gonna go to the file menu and choose save as I'll save it to my desktop. And I'm going to use the tiff file format tiff file format. It's safe. This comes up. I'm using default settings, not touching a single setting in there. If you don't know what the defaults are looking mine and then it's going to save it, I'm gonna close the image, and this will be really weird. When it closed the image and it usually asked, You want to say that it's like I just did. But I'm going to say, Don't say it because it just thinks of that as being a different kind of image, as if you made a change to it. Like flattening or something where it thinks it saved a copy. So anyway, I have merged this together. I went to the final menu. Choose, Save, have saved It is a tiff. Now here's the fun part. I'm gonna go to bridge, and I'm gonna look at where I save that file. It's right here, and I'm going to not double click on it because double clicking out would open and photo shop just like I had a few minutes ago. Instead, I'm gonna go to the file menu and choose opening camera and this is new and Photoshopped CS six. You could not do this in CS five opening camera. This comes up now. I have all the sliders I'm used to using the processes image, which is great because if you use camera, I use camera like dozens of times a day. So my brain is so used to these sliders. It's ridiculous. So being able to apply them to an image like this is great. Let's say we get out of it. So first you see a big spike over here on the right. That tells me we don't have any white. We have a large area of white. I'll take the white slider and say down, Bring that down to darken The whites still got a lot there, So let's bring down the highlights. I'm starting to see the sky show up. It's not very colorful, so let's bring up vibrance. Okay, I'm starting to see a little blue in there. Then the shadows really dark, so let's bring up the shadows. Slider ID usually adjust blacks. If there was a white, a really tall white spike on the end because That would mean we have a large area of black, but we don't. So I'm starting with shadows that up. I can bring up clarity to bring out the texture in that I can mess. With contrast, it's going to start messing with all sorts of stuff in here in if overall it's to brighter too dark, you could mess with exposure and I want to brighten up the whole thing. Bring my highlights down even more and I could adjust my white balance. See what happens. What if I bring it this way? What if I bring it that way? But I'm getting amazing brightness range out of this image, considering what my camera would usually deliver. And if I zoom up on this image, remember when I did it is a single file. How terrible looked. Look at how nice this looks. Do you see any noise in there? Look at that. The texture you're seeing in there is the texture of the sandstone that was there. Whereas if I had done it with a single file, this would look terrible. And so that's the main thing you're gaining. Is Thea Bility to do this with without all the noise could go over here and grab my adjustment brush and say, I want this to be more colorful and maybe auto mask It painted in where the sky is serious and it's not looking the way I want. Which tells me some of the other sliders air probably moved. Try to bring in the sky. I could move the color balance over so it's more blue, that kind of stuff, and I could get a lot out of that image, but I do it using camera and that's new and photo shop. CS six. In previous versions, you would not be able to open what's known as a 32 bit file in camera. And so I think, Did we adjust this image before using cameras? A single file is one of my under exposed examples. Remember we did this. Is it done? Is HDR in in the one we did as a single file, this would have looked all noisy, would have been trying to get rid of the noise. But hear this doesn't have the noise in the shadows because this was done is multiple exposures gone through hdr If you want to see what looked like before I move the sliders. That's what looked like straight out of it. Now had, you know, a state visit. Okay, just the same. It actually didn't have different layers. When you do merged HDR, it gets one layer and so can do it. And the file formats that camera can adjust to my knowledge are JPEG tiff in raw. We can't save into a raw file. A raw file can only be created by your camera. A J Peg file is limited to what's known as eight bits, which is 256 brightness levels. And here we have what's called 32 bits, which is a ridiculous number of brightness levels. And so the only file format that camera rocket open that could have that much data in it, as far as I know is tiff. And so that's why we used to. But it didn't have the noise because because the reason that didn't have a noise is because the time you have noise is when you try to brighten something that's really, really dark. And so if you look at this image on my screen, it's really dark in the dark part of the image. That's where all the noises hanging out, the noises in there right now. If I brighten that up, it's gonna make it easy to see. But then it's only in the dark party or mention it's overly noisy. So if I also shot this shot and I shot this shot, it's going to use this image right here for the dark part of the picture. And the only place it's gonna have noise in this image might be over in here where it's dark. Otherwise, this right here is gonna be noise free, and it's just gonna look really nice. And so it's by capturing, you know, going brighter and brighter and brighter until you could easily see detail in the dark portion of the image that you end up with noise free. Because in the brightest shot, you're not gonna have noise in this stuff. And that's where it's gonna Teoh get that shadow detail from. So all right, any questions about HDR with Kamerad? Yes, All right, you are. Let's see here, Gerrick asked. Can you only edit, adjust HDR camera from photo shops, merge to HDR, or can you use photo? Maddox HDR effects pro. Uh, I haven't done a lot of testing with that S O I think you can. Where you would have to do is merge the image in photo Matics. If that's what you're looking to do because you might like their ghost removal better, you might like their noise reduction or some other feature. Uh, and that might be why you want emergent there. You can save out a 32 bit image from photo Matics without the processing applied. The processing is technically known as tone mapping. If you don't tone map it. The thing I don't know off the top of my head is if Photo man, it could save a tiff file like that. If it can't, you can instead use something like the radiance file format. If you're not familiar with radiance Radiance, the file extension is dot hdr. It's designed for this kind of an image, and you could open that radiance file in Photoshopped and just choose Save as I save it is a tiff. Then you should be able to bring it in through camera, so it's just a matter of kin. Photo manic. Save a tiff that's compatible with Kameron. If you can't save it in a file format that, you know Photoshopped can open, open and photo shop and just just save ass. Pop it over to itself, and you should be able to use automatics for emerging. And then Kimber offer the processing. No. So push in from New York City. Photographer, Can you explain why, again, that you would not recommend HDR and CS five and instead go with something like automatics? Because the end result that you get, I'm not able to usually move the sliders two away, where I'm satisfied with the image. It can look OK, it's much better, for it's much better than previous versions were, but I find it's still lacking when I'm done. So I look at the image. I move the sliders as much as I can, trying to get the most out of it, and I just like it looks okay, but it doesn't look amazing. Where's with photo? Mannix? I could make it look amazing, and so I find I don't need to post processes much if I use automatics and I'm much happier with Look at the end result, but we'll see a six. I'm really happy with the way k Moroccan process those HDR files. I just wish they would have made it. Ah, lot easier. Meaning that I choose Merge to HDR in on the right side. It shows me the camera raw controls. Let me move the sliders and be done with it. There should be no reason to have to save it as a tiff file on, Open it through camera. You know, it's kind of clunk. Early implemented cover blues has wondering about bracketing to where to start. To do that HDR later start to do that. I'm not exactly sure what they're asking. Bracketing is if you set up bracketing your camera when you press and hold the cameras button, it'll take more than one picture in the bracketing setting determines how many shots is gonna take 357 and also determines how big of a difference is there. Between the shots. A lot of cameras have limitations on what they can shoot. Some are limited to having one stop difference between them, and if so, I haven't set to take five shots and other cameras are limited to taking three shots, regardless of what setting you use. And if that's the case, I haven't take three and I get to stops between them. Still getting the same brightness range captured is just I don't have the intermediate files. If I didn't already have junk on the white board, I tried a little bit like new, tipped out the bottom or over him aside. So when you set up bracketing your camera, you're going to see a little gauge. It will go where? On a cannon. This is going to say either minus three or minus two, depending on the model and then minus two minus one zero. Bless one plus two in plus three. You might not have the threes. If you have a let's say, a five d mark three goes all the way out to three. If you have a five d mark to it only goes out to the range of two. When you turn on out of backing, you're gonna find little marks. Will be a little market cool into here, and then if you tell it to take three shots, you'll have three of these marks. If you tell it to have five shots, you know, five of those marks the gap between them. The difference in the numbers is how many stops difference in for most people. For most generic shots, you wanted to have the range of capturing from negative to two plus two. If you have a camera, though, that can't do two stops of a difference between these Most night cons. Can't do two stops between them. Then you set your camera to do five shots with one stop difference between them, and you end up with that many shots in order to get that same brightness range captured. You don't need this file. You don't need this file, but you have to capture it because of the way your camera is. Uh, it doesn't hurt having those files other than it takes up more space than it's gonna take longer to process in on some images that will make it smoother. But I'm most it wouldn't matter. It can make things a little bit smoother, but it's only in extreme cases. When that would be the case, I would say in 85% of the cases, you only need three shots and that so for the vast majority images, you'd be fine with three. It's easy to handhold if you're doing three shots. If you're doing five shots, you really need to have a high frames per second camera to make it seeking. Shoot handheld. Like if you have the Nikon D 800 I don't suggest doing handheld HDR. It's three frames per second. That means to get this many shots. It's going to take like three. It's gonna take a second and 1/2 to capture it. You can't hold still that long. If you have a faster camera, shoots more frames per second, then that's not a problem on my can, and I'm limited to having three shots. I put him to stops apart, so I get the same brightness range there minus the middle shots. It takes up less space on my card, takes less time to process it, and 85% of the time, that would give me perfectly fine detail for those times. I'm worried about it. What I would do is I'd be in a tripod. I would take these three shots, click, click, click and then I would change the exposure compensation on my camera to either plus or minus one stop, and that would then the next time you press the shutter. Take these shots and I'd end up with six. When I put them all together, they would be spaced one stop apart. But it all depends how advanced you are with thinking about it. All right. With HDR, you can create a photographic looking and result, or one that looks more like a somewhat like a drawing where people say, Is it a photo? And if you're looking for that, is it a photo kind of look that some people, like some other people hate when your in camera, the clarity slider, is going to be the main slider that determines if you get that or not? If you turn clarity up a little bit and still look photographic. But if you crank it, it's gonna be one of those. Is it a photo kind of things? So in my portfolio portfolio, I have somewhere I really push it. These air early HDR images, though that would look could look different today if I process them with more modern software. But some people say, is that a photo? Because of the amount of detail you can see in it you're not used to seeing, You know, some people asked are these photos? Where are they? Drawings or something else? Now that one started example. But some of these where you can see a lot of texture and detail. Um, yeah. Do you do the clarity before the merger after you do that clarity when your in camera raw after the merge, the only thing you got to be very careful with the slaughters he moved before the merge do not bring up saturation. We're vibrance before the merge. Don't move the general adjustment sliders. With a few exceptions on the darkest image, you could bring up the shadows slider a little bit if you still make, if it's still a little bit hard to see shadow detail in it. But if you change things like saturation or vibrance, you'll find when you merge the image together, things like skies will end up looking. Posterized will be big. Flatter is a color and look bad, and that's because he moved to many sliders and camera. I usually adjust, uh, white balance, chromatic aberrations, lens corrections, like the distortion of your lens, that kind of stuff. Um, and I try not to mess with the other sliders because they could give you weird looking in results