We’ve all seen those cool rusty old cars done in HDR style, well I’ve found one on the side of Highway 9 on the way to Zion National Park in Utah. I couldn’t help but snap more than a few auto bracketed sets from various angles.

By pongky

Sometimes we come across an image that’s obviously highly processed, yet it works, especially for this shot. Just check out the tones and reflections found on the side of this old car in a showroom.

By Michael Brooking Photography

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

Here at HDR HQ we like to give out freebies, and what better freebies than to give a set of auto-bracketed images that you can download for free to test your HDR skills with? I only ask for a link or credit if you use it on your site. Today we have the yellow Honda S2000. Here’s my rendition of the image, maybe you can interpret it a different way? If you do post it somewhere, post a link in the comments please. Download the RAW files here (33mb).

To HDR, or not to HDR? The question may arise for your next car photo. Is it worth the extra 5-10 minutes in merging, aligning the multiple exposures to create the HDR look, or is it just as good or better if you just edit the single RAW as is? Some would say they like the look of non-HDR images better. So here’s a side-by-side look at how an image that is processed as a single RAW (top) compared to an HDR processed image (bottom). Both are processed similarly in Lightroom. Can you spot the differences (click to view large)

The new 2010 Audi TT.

Let us ignore the color saturation, as that can be corrected in Lightroom. Instead we can focus on the darker areas of the top image — especially towards the lower left of the image where the left edge of the bumper is. See how much brighter and clearer the HDR version is? The contrast between the bright reflections and the dark on the glossy car surface is more apparent in the HDR version – as you can see the rear A pillar seems much more dark than the non-HDR version. There just seems to be an extra coat of super glossy clearcoat on the car in the HDR version.

Another very apparent difference is in how much detail can be seen on the surface of the roadway in the HDR version as it’s able to bring out more details in the shadows.

However, there are some “bad” HDR artifcats that can be found in the lower image, such as the movement of the people apparent in the right part of the rear bumper (ghosting) and also in the person sitting on the chair who turned his head during the 3-exposure bracketing (I say he’s been HDR-ized). It’s up to you which look fits what you need or like better – but since you are reading this site, it seems like you’ve already gone to the dark side of photography — the HDR side, that is.