Tutorial: High Dynamic Range (repost)

[JakeB.]

HDR (High Dynamic Range) Images are always a hot topic, so here is a short look at how I make mine. First, HDR are one pictures that use two or more shots with different exposures to create one picture that has a good exposure throughout. There are several ways to do these types of shots; Photoshop CS2 has a HDR Merge tool that people seem to have marginal success with. There are also many dedicated hdr sotware programs, one of which is Photomatix. I prefer to make my HDR images by hand with PS 7. The idea of creating an HDR comes from using the bracket feature on your camera, where you would take several shots of the same scene using different setting to have different parts of the shots at optimal exposure. You can also create an HDR image from one RAW file; which is how I'll do it. Here is the original file, converted as shot. The first thing that need to be done is to import the file into PS. I use Adobe Lightroom for initial color correction, so when I send the file to PS it automatically opens as a tiff file. There are three parts to this image that I want to expose for; the building, the sky, and the moon... I expose differently for the moon because it's an effective light source. Here you see the three file opened seperately in PS. To create one image from three, you must have them all in one PS project. So, I just use the move tool to drag two images into the third as a new layer. I've renamed the layers to show what each one will contain. Here, working with the building layer, I select the sky (includint the moon) so that it can be cut to a new layer. We don't need this sky because we're going to use the one underneath it. So, delete the layer. Now we have the building and sky exposures that we want, so we need to select the moon that we want to get rid of. I selected this with the magic wand tool. Once selected, we cut it to a new layer. Before deleting the moon layer, I toggled it on & off to see if it looked good. I didn't care for the exposure of the moon on the bottom layer, but it was too bright leaving it the way it was before cutting it out. So, I just lowered the opacity of the layer to my liking. Now that I have all my layers set up the way I want them, I go about adjusting the colors of each. I wanted to play with the color of the sky some, so I selected the sky exposure layer and opened the saturation box. I selected only the blue colors int the saturation box and adjusted to my liking. Adjusting the color brought out a bit of noise in the sky, and I wanted to eliminate that. So, I copied the sky layer to create the blur on a seperate layer. With the sky blur layer selected I opened the Guassian Blur tool and adjusted to my liking. Depending on how much you blur, you may have to go back and delete some of where the blur will bleed over onto the moon or building. Next I wanted to adjust the color and contrast of the building. I decided to do this with the levels box. In the box, you can see that there isn't very much information on the right side... the whites. By sliding the right (white) marker to the left, that area now becomes the brightest part of the image with color information. Everything to the right of that marker is now white. I also played with the middle slider a bit too. I have all the colors where I want them, so to create my jpeg, I flatten all the layers. Before I do this I save the entire project as a psd. Then I perform my resize to 900x600 for web viewing, and perform a slight bit of sharpening via Unsharp Mask. Here is the completed file: And the original again to compare.

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[GQej1]

I'm bringin this one back from the dead. It's a good one for people getting into post editing

[vc]

I've always wanted to try HDR! Looks like it's the time, thanks!