If you have seen my flickr photostream, you should know that I go to a lot of car shows, and shoot almost all my shots in HDR. I am fortunate enough to live about 5 minutes from a weekly car show called Cars and Coffee here on the border of Las Vegas and Henderson. Just this past weekend, it was perfect weather with overcast skies but no sun – giving us a nice even light with no annoying bright sun ruining many angles. So here is one of my favorite shots from that day.

The Shoot
I carried my tripod that day, ensuring many stable auto-bracketed HDR sets. The lighting worked for almost any angle works because there is no sun to worry about. I set the tripod up behind this Mini Cooper S and fired off 3 shots with the Canon 5D and 17-40mm f/4 lens (essential for car shows and landscapes). Cars usually look good from the corner angles and given a bit of tilt to add perceived motion and aggressiveness. A shot from the ground (mouse-eye view) usually works good too, but this time I opted for eye-level looking down so you can see the top of the Mini. The deep metallic grey and double yellow lines really makes this particular Mini stand out, and I thought it would turn out well in HDR. You decide:

By pongky ©

The Processing
Since the AEB set of exposures were shot on a tripod, I didn’t have to check the “align images” box in Photomatix – thus reducing the merging time. I dragged it into Photomatix and made sure I adjusted the colors and exposure levels. Usually what I do in Photomatix is increase the gamma so that it looks slightly overexposed (maybe by half a stop) so that I can do more with it in Lightroom in terms of blacks and contrasts. I find this technique works very well. In Lightroom I cropped out all the useless background elements (which is why the roof is partially cut) and adjusted the tones and color saturation to get it to this point. I hope you like it – and if you are really interested, you can also have the AEB RAW files by downloading from here. Let me know if you use it and come up with another result!

Ever wonder how retail sites can have pure white backgrounds in their product photos? Well a part of it is done during the shoot with the proper lighting and camera settings. Another part of it – which is as equally important – is done during post processing. I want – no, need – to do as little of photoshopping (airbrushing, lasso-ing, magic-wand-ing) as possible, so here comes Lightroom to the rescue. I do a lot of selling on eBay and it pays to have the products look as good as possible.

I’ve had many requests to explain how I get my pure white background in my product shots. Well, there is a pretty nifty technique in Lightroom that allows you to do so. Of course, you should already start with an image that has a white background. I am not going to tell you to lasso around the product, cut and paste pixels and whatnot. The way I do it in Lightroom usually works well with medium or darker color objects, but here we go. We start out with an image taken from a product shooting setup (like the one below):

So we take the RAW file into Lightroom and click on the ‘Develop’ tab on the top right. You see the histogram display on the top right? Click the upper-right most “up” triangle button to toggle the display to show which parts of the image is pure white.

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If it’s not enough to envelope the product image, then increase the “Exposure” slider to the right until the redness is satisfactorily sorrounding the object.

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Once you’re happy with that, go click on that same “up” triangle, and the red will be hidden again. Now you see your object is over-exposed, yikes!

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Not to worry – now adjust the “Brightness” and/or “Blacks” sliders down until you get the right exposure you want. Note that when you adjust these sliders, the areas that were pure white in the image is untouched, meaning you will not have any greys where there was already pure white.

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So these two sliders only affect the pixels where there is a value any other than #FFFFFF (pure white). “Clarity” helps as well with the edges and makes the product image look crisper. You might do one more last final check to see if the pure white area was preserved during the Blacks and Brightness adjustments.I hope this helps!

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Sample photos (see more product photos)

Today we will be starting a series of “how-to” or “behind-the-scenes” blogs of the technique behind the actual shoot or the processing of some of my HDR work. We will start off with this image I captured while on a Valley of Fire trip north of Las Vegas (2008).

The shoot
The sun was setting, and we were driving from point to point at the national park trying to catch the views before the sun set. As I was about to get back into the car, I saw this perfect alignment of the car, the sun, the curvy road and the time of day – so I just had to kneel, make sure to get a good composition using the 15mm fisheye (I’m glad it didn’t turn out to be overly distorted) and snapped off a series of auto-exposure-bracketed shots hand-held using the continuous mode on my Canon EOS 5D. I’m pretty pleased with the results where you can see details in the darker parts of the car (away from the sun) and the mixture of warm and cold colors in the sky.

Click to view large

The processing
The processing was done in Photomatix Pro 3 using details enhancer and then polished off in Adobe Lightroom 2. In photomatix I wanted to keep it more real, and not “fantasy” HDR – plus since I had a white car in the scene, I couldn’t get some nice reflections off the paint. After exporting as 16-bit tiff from Photomatix, I was able to further edit the saturation and curves to finally end up with the final result. The only regret was that I couldn’t get more clouds in the shot and I wish I could get the car to be more white in color. Gear used: Canon EOS 5D with Canon EF 15mm Fisheye lens

So what if you come back from your shoot, and find that:

* there is too much camera movement to get a clean auto alignment (and you’re too lazy to manually align them)
* there is undesired movement in the frames – such as a moving person or cars
* you thought your camera was in auto-exposure bracketing mode, but instead you only got a series of shots with the same exact exposures
* you deleted one of your exposures in your set accidentally
* the shot is an action shot (eg. a bird, plane, or car racing) that makes it impossible to do a bracketed set

Can you still do HDR if any of these conditions apply? YES! That is possible with just one RAW. We shall call it the HDR1 process, which is short for HDR processing using one (single) exposure. In this article we will be discussing how to achieve HDR results using the HDR1 process and compare it to another image of the same scene with the same exact output settings in post processing so you can easily see the results between the two processes.

HDR1

With the HDR1 process – it is entirely possible to do an HDR out of any single RAW shot you want. Before we are able to merge the images, we have to create the bracketed set first. This is done by exporting the normal exposure (metered) exposure as a 16-bit TIF file. Yes, TIF files are huge, a 12 megapixel image is 71mb in size – but well worth it. Then you need to adjust the exposure to +2 and -2 and export those as TIF as well, so now you have your set as well. You could try going with a broader range ( such as +3, -3 or +4,-4 ) but the results typically won’t be quite natural.

Once you have your digitally-produced bracketed set of 2 or more “exposures”, then we take it into a HDR merging software such as Photomatix. Photomatix will have a different setting and you will sometimes have to manually assign the exposure value (EV) for each of the frame. This is different when you are dragging in a set of RAW files from a folder. Now you have your set of TIF files – you do not have to check the “align images” option, which speeds up the merging time considerably.

Here is a comparison of a shot taken with 3 bracketed shots and a HDR1 image. Can you spot the differences? Click on them both and they will open up in the same window, then you can click back/forward to compare the images.

HDR1 (single exposure)

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3-exposure HDR

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Results:
* The darks are darker ( more contrast ) in the 3-exposure HDR image
* More dynamic range (not much, though) in the 3-exposure HDR image
* Colors seem to be more vibrant in the 3-exposure HDR image
* More detail in the clouds in the 3-exposure HDR image

Other Examples

By Artie | Photography

By Abed Dodokh

By Omar Junior

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, or some people call it HDRi with the “i” being imagery. Either way it is the same thing. It is really a technical process in which a series of two or more exposures of the same scene are shot with varying exposures are combined — or merged — into one image that has a substantially higher dynamic range than any one of those shots in the bracketed set.

“Dynamic range” as defined by dcview.com is “the amount of detail your camera can record between highlights and shadows in an image.” Another way to put it is the ability to capture more details both in the highlights and lowlights in an image, especially if there is more than 2-stop difference between parts in the image — for example, a bright sky and a cave, or an interior view of a window looking out during the day.

The bracketed sets are usually all at the same settings except for the shutter speed. It really helps to have a camera with an actual AEB feature (I know the Nikon D40 and D40x does not have this feature) and a continuous high drive mode, especially if you are not using a tripod. The auto bracketed images can vary in EV (exposure value) depending on how much dynamic range you want. I like to push it to -2, 0, and +2 EV for any given shot because it will give me the most dynamic range — as opposed to -1/3, 0, +1/3 EV — which won’t yield any noticable difference.

Another way to vary the exposures on the images is to vary the ISO — but that can only be found on high end models such as the Canon EOS 1D series. For all intents and purposes, our auto-bracketed shots will be done with varying shutter speeds.

The Process
In this example we have three exposures of the same scene, taken at -2, 0, and +2 EV. You can see after it has been merged in an HDR program like Photomatix Pro 3, that the result has a unique look of its own. You can see that the shiny surface of the car is much more glossy and reflective, and the headlights seem to have much more detail in them. What you end up with a 12.8 megapixel 16-bit tiff file that is roughly 71mb in size. You can take the .tiff and head over to your favorite image editing software.

Comparing JPG vs HDR
So you might think, “well, I don’t want to spend the extra 10 minutes editing this pic in HDR” or “I don’t want to sift through 3 images of the same thing after I download it” — well I hope these two images will prove to you that it is in fact, well worth the effort.

Comparing edited RAW vs HDR
Ok, so that last example isn’t exactly fair, an unedited JPG straight from the camera surely won’t stand up to a processed HDR image. Well here we have the same metered exposure (EV 0) RAW file that I edited in Lightroom. As you can see the left image is much nicer and more balanced than the JPG above, but it still pales in range and detail compared to the tone mapped HDR image on the right.