HDR Pictures

[mukmaster]

WOW those Images are freaking amasing.
I wish so dearly to get a digi cam soon

[Soulburner]

My camera can't shoot RAW...I need to find a back to back comparison to see how big the difference is.

It can do "superfine" though which keeps compression to a minimum, which is what I use. I'll decide on the final product at the end, but I want all pics to start looking the best they can.

[jimmsch]

I have been playing with this for a few days now. I am quite impressed with photomatix. This type of photo processsing surely produces some beautiful pics. I find that usinf photomatix to merge the three photos into one HDR and then uding photoshop cs3 to do the fine tuning works best for me. But I am just starting to learn this. Thanks to you guys for teaching me about it. I will post some pics once I get a better grip on the whole thing and I have some good ones.

[splat00n]

I tryed doing these with my camera but it sucked, probably didn't even do it right. I believe you need a tripod and take three pics of the same spot with different lighting right?

[Holst]

I have the trial version of photoshop CS but there is no option for HDR under merge..

Can I download this as a plugin?

[jimmsch]

I tryed doing these with my camera but it sucked, probably didn't even do it right. I believe you need a tripod and take three pics of the same spot with different lighting right?

If you are lucky your camera will have a function to take three pics with one click all at different exposures. It is called "bracketing" check here for more info on that. Also check here for general info on HDR. There are more links at the bottom of this page before the user comments. A tripod is almost mandatory.

[jimmsch]

OK here are some before and after pics. I used the bracketing features on my camera to snap three pics in different exposures. The camera was set to snap the pics at default exposure and +/-2. The before pic is the default one. Then I used photomatix to generate the HDR. I used photomatix for some tone mapping and fine tuned it in photoshop.
Before:


After:


I didn't do any painting, just the tone mapping in photomatix and then some brightness/contrast adjustments and color saturation adjustments in PS.

I think this HDR stuff is an awesome tool!

[snq]

Very nice jimmsch!

[Soulburner]

Wow that is an awesome picture. Rather discouraging, as I tried my first HDR last night with extremely bad results. I used Photoshop > Merge to HDR. I didn't have the best pics to try though so I will mess with it more when I do.

[Nephilim]

You can do the same thing with a JPEG.

My camera is in my sig.

No you cannot. Not in the sense that he was inferring.

Let me see if I can explain, JPEG is compressed and as such any non-visible variations between pixels is disregarded.

RAW is not compressed and is essentially a mathematical representation of what light each and every pixel received, devoid of any processing.

What that means is, for example, areas that are solid white and overexposed can often be "reclaimed" using a RAW processor, since the pixels received slightly differing light it was just not possible to show it and maintain a reasonable contrast in the shot.

Your camera is incapable of RAW and as such you probably will miss out on a lot. The only pro-sumer I've used with RAW is the Panasonic FZ8 but that's an inferior camera aside from that one neat feature.

Here is a nice interactive RAW advantages and explanation page.

[Soulburner]

Actually, there is a RAW hack for this camera via modified firmware

[Magnj]

You can adjust exposure in CS2, are we talking about the same thing?

Yes and no, you can correct color and brightness to some extent. But JPEG writes the exposure settings to the shot and can not be changed. So if your shot is too warm you CAN fix it but not nearly as well as in RAW where with a program like Adobe Lightroom, you can switch from what it was shot in to say Tungsten.

[eddieate]

This is my first attempt, only using 2 images.

Ed.

[Soulburner]

Lucky...nice view.

[Magnj]

Here's my latest...using Photomatix and one single RAW file converted to 4 Jpegs. The crop is bad but this was just to see if I could actually get a reflection off the car or not.

[Nephilim]

The alternative (and traditional) way of creating this sort of effect is with graduated neutral density filters.

However that technique is most useful when there is a defined horizon. If you're a landscape photographer that's 9 times out of 10.

Marc Adamus is a professional photographer who uses graduated ND filters to great effect, so each of his shots usually required one exposure only (and are much sharper because of it).

[Brettbeck]

My dad took some nice photos the other day when he drove up to Scotland.

He did some bracketing with 9 or 12 shots and created some HDR pictures... they looked quite nice, but the scenery wasn't that amazing lol . I don't think I could upload them because the images are all in excess of about 40Mb. He took all the shots in RAW format too which increases the file size.

[mukmaster]

THat was my firstie

[ColonelCain]

I think im in love with HDR pics. Good Christ, they look awesome. Here soon I may make a few of my own..

Same here. I have loved HDR pics ever since I saw that HDR Tokyo pic. Very nice work guys.

[Sparky]

I'm going to have to try this now. My Canon 350D can shoot in RAW and has the bracketing, and I have a tripod (was broken, got for free, and I built a new hinge for it ). Gonna have to find something good to shoot....

[Dr.LED]

How do you like these?

[itznfb]

^^^ awesome

[lowfat]

An HDR a friend of mine did.

[Grinch]

How do you like these?

awesome pics!
to xtremesystems

[RAW-Raptor22]

Fantastic we need more photo gurus on the boards. Welcome. I wish I new anything about photography...