An Intro to HDR & Photomatix
So you’re interested in expanding your dynamic range with a little HDR? First step in any photography project is obviously taking the photos that we want to work with. If you haven’t figured out this part than go read your cameras manual and come on back when you’re ready. For an HDR image we are going to start with creating a few different exposures of the exact same scene. To keep things basic we are going to shoot 3 frames. One properly exposed, one over exposed by 2 stops, and one under exposed by 2 stops. The trick here is to keep your camera as steady as possible. A tripod is ideal but if you have a steady hand and a fast motor drive then you can probably get away with hand holding the camera as long as your slowest shutter speed is above 1/50th of a second or so. When you shoot your 3 images make sure to keep your aperture the same and only change the shutter speed. Otherwise you will be effecting the depth of field and the overall clarity of the final image. ISO should be set as low as possible. HDR can bring out a lot of noise in photos so ISO 100 or 50 is ideal. You can get away with shooting in JPEG but shooting in Raw helps with noise as well.
Over Exposed 1/6th @ f/22
Middle Exposure - 1/25th @ f/22
Under Exposed 1/100th @ f/22
We now have our 3 exposures, next comes the fun part. We need to combine these three exposures into some kind of mega super cool crazy perfect epic exposure that covers a dynamic range that our camera is incapable of on its own. There are a number of ways to do this but the simplest is to open up the three files in a program like HDRsoft’s Photomatix and let the program do its thing. Open up Photomatix and click on the “Generate HDR” button.
Follow the red arrow
When you hit “OK” the program will show you this dialog. You can mess around with the settings a bit but for a daytime outdoors photo this is where I start off. When you start off, it will have white-balance set to Auto but if it was daytime you might as well just sync the white-balance between all three photos by selecting daylight in the drop down menu.
Click “Generate HDR” and the program is off to the races. It’ll do a bunch of stuff then give you this cool little preview window. This IS NOT our final image. This is simply a 32-bit preview of our HDR image. You can move your mouse around the image (yellow arrow) and watch the preview window (red arrow) to see what color and exposure information really exists within the 32-bit image.
Yay! We’ve made it to the fun part. Go ahead and click on the button that says “Tone Mapping”. This is going to give you two different options on how to “tone map” your image. I chose to use the Detail Enhancer. To start off the default settings may give you everything you need, but the sliders are way too fun to play with to just stay there. Be careful not to go too crazy here though as our goal is to create a “relatively” realistic image. I usually try to create a starting point here. What I mean by that is to create an image that has relatively flat contrast and isn’t clipping any information off of the shadows or highlights. I can then finish that off in Photoshop later on.
Our image with the default settings in 'details enhancer'
Now go ahead and click “Process” and then save this file to your desktop. At this point you can open up this image in your preferred editing program and put on your final touches to get the color and pop that you are looking for. That’s it! If I missed anything just let me know in the comments! Ill be happy to help out! Cheers!
Final Product
Chris Park is a photographer based in sunny San Diego, Calif. On the side he’s a professional shell collector, backyard chiller, bbq master, and wannabe dog whisperer. After 10 years in the field he would like to share his technical knowledge and the occasional gear review.
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Nice Tutorial. I also use photomatrix for my HDR conversions but I am really wanting to see how well Photoshop CS5 has integrated it. Just waiting on my copy to get here.
Hi Nathan,
Ill be posting up a bunch of CS5 tutorials in the near future. The new merge to hdr pro feature is great! Far superior to the system in CS3 and CS4.
That’s good news. Looking forward to see what you have for us.
Thanks for this great tutorial !
Sorry if you already mentioned it elsewhere, but is Photomatrix free ?
If it’s not is there a free replacement somewhere ? I’m completely new to photography so I’m not sure I want to immediately spend money in that kind of tools.