HDR images capture the full luminosity of a scene, from the brightest light to the darkest shadow. Photographers have always been faced with the problem of exposing for light in any given scene. Take, for instance, a photo taken in a dimly lit room with a window in the scene looking out to bright daylight. If you expose for the light available inside, anything outside will be blown-out and overexposed and the opposite will happen if you expose for the sunny outdoor scene. Then the inside will be too underexposed. By capturing the light of both scenes by taking multiple exposures to cover this range, we come closer to seeing the range our eyes see. The human eye can differentiate contrast up to 1:10,000, or a dynamic range of 14 EV but the eye can also adapt to different lighting situations making the range more like 1:1,000,000,000. Modern film can only capture up to 8 EVs so only a little more than half what our eyes can see at best.

There’s so much more science to this, but I’ll leave that for those who know it best. If you’re interested in reading more you could purchase this book: The HDRI Handbook.

HDR is quite the rage these days. You can make an image anywhere from super punchy to other-worldly and psychedelic. Here, I show you a way to take it to about level seven. For this tutorial you’ll need Photoshop and Photomatix Pro. There are many ways to make an HDR image, this is just one of the many methods I use. The ideal way to create an HDR image is by bracketing with your camera to create several images of the same scene from underexposed to overexposed, all at the same aperture and ISO and using a steady tripod. Sometimes if I’m feeling lazy or am in a hurry I’ll just adjust my shutter speed from underexposed to overexposed manually as I did here.

Here’s the source images I’m using

These images were as follows:
Image 1: shutter speed 2.5 seconds
F8
ISO 100
Image 2: shutter speed 6 seconds
F8
ISO 100
Image 3: shutter speed 10 seconds
F8
ISO 100

As you can see, since I was in a hurry and on a photo shoot for a client, I didn’t want to go out of my way to set up bracketing, which I’ll cover in an other tutorial, but merely having these three different exposures can still produce striking effects in HDR.

I opened Photomatix Pro and selected Process>Generate HDR. Browse for the images you want to use. Click OK.

Then you’ll see this window:

I chose to reduce chromatic aberrations, or color fringes that can appear as well as noise, which can be an issue in shadow areas when you’re dealing with such a high dynamic range and digital photography. Now click Generate HDR.

This is the HDR image produced:

This image looks a little dark and not as snazzy as you’d expect from and HDR image. That’s because we haven’t tone mapped it yet. Tone mapping helps bring the radical contrast we see in an HDR image back to the realm in which we can see the darkest shadows and the lightest lights. Tone mapping bring everything in to view. Here’s the settings I used as the tone mapped image in the Photomatix Pro window.

Once we click Process we get this result. A tone mapped HDR image.

A lot of times, tone mapped HDR images can have halos around dark shadows and color fringes around bright lights. This where our old friend Photoshop comes in. Save the tone mapped HDR image, then open one of your original photos. Choose one that closely resembles the HDR version and make necessary adjustments using camera RAW. You can use camera RAW on JPEGS too. Go in to Photoshop>Preferences>File Handling and click Prefer Adobe Raw for JPEG images. In this case, I’m not liking the color fringes around the neon blue lights so I open this original image here using these setting in Camera RAW:

Once I opened the original image I chose File>Place and placed the HDR image over the top of my original photo on a new layer.
Then I made sure my Layers Palette was open and the HDR image layer was on top of my original photo. I then select the HDR layer and click Create Layer Mask at the bottom of the Layers Palette.

By creating a layer mask I will now be essentially cutting holes in my HDR image to allow some of my original image to be seen through the hole. This is sometimes necessary to correct the wild effects that can happen from HDR. To start masking, I make sure my foreground color is black, select the feathered Brush Tool and set the brush to 30% opacity. Now I can begin brushing the original image back in where there are areas of psychedelic color fringing around the lights.

I’ll create another tutorial for masking another day but email me if you have questions.

Once I mask away those crazy light fringes and flattened the image in the layers menu my image is done. I saved the new HDR image and that’s it. Well, almost. I decided to get creative and place my HDR image on the little monitor in the bottom-right hand corner of the image. To do this I File>Placed my HDR image in a new layer. (You can place the same image you have open in itself.) Then I clicked Edit>Transform>Scale and scaled the image down to just a touch bigger than the monitor screen. The I right-clicked the layer of my placed image in the layers palette and clicked Rasterize Layer. Now I can use Edit>Transform>Distort to make my image angle fit correctly in to the monitor. To make sure I do this correctly, I reduced the Layer Opacity to about 15% so I could see the monitor through my little rasterized image.

That’s it! Here’s the final image:

HDR can be used in so many ways. Some people like it, some people don’t. The same could be said for anything digitally created. There will always be someone bad-mouthing technology and it’s ever-expanding possibilities. HDR can be used to create over-saturated painterly effects, or can be used sparingly to just add a little something extra to an image using the composite method. We’re bginning to see HDR used more often in motion pictures as well. Once you get to know HDR, you’ll start to recognize it instanty, even when it’s used in the most subtle way.

My next HDR tutorial will deal with using this technique in the composite method. The subtle way. The one I prefer.