Lessons
Lesson Info
HDR
It's a beautiful room, this is the Southern Mansion in Cape May, New Jersey, I was doing workshop out there last year and we get access to all these amazing facilities. It was very kind to open it up to us. So here's a typical thing when you're shooting a place like this, it's beautiful, we've got the interior and I've got the nice exposure there, maybe brighten it up a little bit and really show that interior. Now one of the things that architectural photographers, or real estate photographers have been struggling with for a long time is dynamic range. Notice those windows out there. Everything is just blowing out. Look in the mirror, you can't see the detail. It's too bright, the camera says it can't handle it. We've got a dark room and a bright outside. Now this is the real purpose of HDR. HDR we can use as an effect, we can do some cool things with it, which I'm a big fan of and I love doing and once again I have a whole course, check it out on Creative Live here on HDR. Now, one o...
f the things we can do though is we can stop down the camera, look at this, and now we've set the proper exposure for outside. We can see that nice detail on those lace curtains, you didn't even know there was lace curtains before. And you can see that detail, and outside we could see the detail, the lamps looks good, the reflections look good but things are dark, so what photographers did until just recently is they would put up big sheets on the windows, tinted film and what they would do is would lower the exposure from outside. So it was like a big set-up, to shoot something like that or you would blast inside of a whole ton of lights which is great to get the brightness, but if you wanna get the actual ambient lights coming down properly, blasting a bunch of lights inside is not gonna accomplish that effect. So it used to be the film, you get the film, you put it over the windows, so now we can take the multiple exposures, we've got that one there, just a regular exposure. This one here is underexposed by two stops to show all that detail outside, and this one is overexposed by two stops to show all the detail in the shadows such as some of these areas here that just kinda blocked out. And by overexposing, I can bring all the information there. So all we need to do is select the three images right now. Under Filmstrip, click on the top, and by the way, in case you didn't notice, when you work inside of Camera Raw and you have multiple images, the Filmstrip appears. And that's how you can go through and select the photos. So we're gonna go under there and now we're going to merge to HDR. Inside of Camera Raw, that's pretty crazy if you ask me. Alright, so we've got the HDR preview, we can align images, apply auto tone, yeah let's do all that, that's great. And we're just gonna click Merge. So what it's gonna do now is it's gonna create a file that's actually a DNG file that it's gonna save, and we can save it wherever we want. I saved it into the ACR folder, and then you're gonna find an additional image is now gonna appear at the bottom. So see this image at the bottom? This is a DNG, but it's an HDR. It's all the detail from these three photographs have now been put into this photograph. So to give you an example, if I go to the first one, and I take the exposure, this is how bright I can go, and this is how dark it can go. Wooh, look at that man, that's amazing! Look how much detail is outside. That's the beauty of Raw, it's got incredible amount of dynamic range, but still not as much as working with HDR. If we go here, and look at this. Look at that, you can see way outside. See how much detail is in there? So HDR at one point was kind of, when it first came out, everyone uses an effect, I did a lot to get that sketched looking thing, it was like, "Oh, look at this! "It looks like it was hand-painted." That was a great novelty it actually became the look of the day, for a day. And now people have kinda progressed and people like, "Argh, I'm disgusted by that!" I'm not disgusted by it because I think art is art. It's in the eye of the beholder. So I love it all. But these days it's more about realism, and so a lot of case I can play around with some of these sliders here, recovering the highlights, and look at how much highlight detail we can recover there. It's like suddenly all of these sliders went to the gym and all became the Rock. (crowd chuckles) Suddenly these sliders are just really powerful, and look at this, we can do anything we want inside a photo. This is part of photography of the future by the way. The more dynamic range, I don't care about megapixels anymore. What I care about is dynamic range. The camera eventually will be out to capture the entire spectrum invisible light on that sense, and when that day happens you won't have to do this anymore. All your photos will do that, and until then, keep watching. (crowd chuckles) Alright so (chuckles) but look at this photograph, now look at that. I'm just using the sliders, I'm not gonna explain the basic sliders cause we already did, and we're just making these basic adjustments here, and you can see what we can do. I mean you can push it if you wanna go for that kind of look that we used to do, push the clarity all the way up. If you want more realism, pull it (mumbles) down. So anyway and of course at that point we can open the image Oh here's another thing too. When you go to open the image, you got some options. See we can open it, if we click it it will open it inside of Photoshop just as a PSD. If we hold the Option, it will create a copy of it and it will open that, and then you can go back and you can make more adjustments, open a different copy, or if you hold the Shift key down, it will open an object, which means it will open as a smart object. Now the smart object is great cause that way it's non-destruct, you could go back in and you can make all these adjustments, you can tweak them later. So I would recommend that. In fact, I would recommend that so much that I would change the defaults. And the defaults are found under the ugliest button that Adobe has ever made in the history of Adobe software. That is a button. (crowd chuckles) (chuckles) At the very bottom there. That, all that. So if you click on that, we go to the Workflow Options, and we can choose to open as a smart object. If we turn that on, click OK. Notice now, instead of Open, now it says Open Object. You can also hit the Shift to go back to Open Image. So now I Open Object, it's gonna open it as a smart object inside of Photoshop proper. There it is, the proper Photoshop. And if we want to go back here, we just double click, and it'll take us back into Camera Raw, and it's like, you know what, this is looking awesome! But the one thing that I didn't get to do is apply one of these cool color profiles, so maybe I like some of these other profiles better. Oh yeah, look at Adobe Vivid. Yeah, that's what I wanted to do, click OK. And it updates it inside of Photoshop. So that's one of the great things about opening it as a smart object. Change your mind later, you can do anything. Nothing we've done to that is baked in or destructive. So that's working with HDR inside of Camera Raw. Is it possible to batch process sets of HDR images in Camera Raw? No it is not. The only tool that I know that's capable of batch processing HDR right now is Photomatix. Photomatix Pro. I'm not saying there's not other ones out there, but that's all I know of.