My HDR Technique

Recently it seems that I’ve been getting more and more questions on my HDR processing steps. So I thought, why not type up a blog post about it. Let me start by saying I didn’t write the book on HDR but I am writing this post about it. If you are a Dtowntv watcher you’ll get the refrence.

Prerequisites:

·         That you already know how to get at least 3 exposures to produce a HDR shot.

Equipment/Software Needed:

·         Camera with at Aperture Priority or Manual mode.

·         Photoshop

·         Photomatix

·         Topaz Adjust

 

Merging Your Shots Into a HDR Shot Using Photomatix Pro 4.0

1.       Click “Load Bracketed Photos” and browse to your files.
2.       Then click “OK”.
3.       Processing Options:

• Check “Align source images”
  
• Check “Crop aligned images”
  
• Check “Reduce ghosting artifacts”
  
• Choose “Automatic” & Detection “High”
  
• Check “Reduce chromatic aberrations”
  
• I leave White Balance set to “As Shot”
  
• Color primaries HDR image is left to “Adobe RGB”
  
• Then click “OK”
  

4.       This will produce an un-tone mapped shot and will open up into a window where you can begin to set your tone mapping options.
5.       I choose “Tone Mapping” for the Process.
6.       For the Method I choose “Details Enhancer”
7.       Now I play around with the various settings to get my desired look. I’ve created a few Presets of my own and I generally start with them and adjust from there. Here is a list of my settings that I typically use.

• Strength – 100
  
• Color Saturation – 50
  
• Luminosity – 5.0
  
• Microcontrast – 6.3
  
• Smoothing – 1.0
  
• White Point – 1.318%
  
• Black Point – 0.707%
  
• Gamma – 1.10
  
• Temperature – 0.0
  
• Saturation Highlights – 0.0
  
• Saturation Shadows – 0.0
  
• Micro-smoothing – 2.8
  
• Highlights smoothing – 11
  
• Shadow clipping – 0
  

  

  Screen Shot of Adding Tone Mapping in Photomatix Pro 4.0 (Click to View Larger)

8.       The click “Process”. This will add your tone mapping choices to the file.
9.       Now you are ready to save the file. Click “File”, “Save As”, choose “TIFF 16 bit” for the type.

Results after finishing up in Photomatrix Pro 4.0

Processing The TIFF File Using Topaz Adjust & Photoshop:

1.       Open up Photoshop (I’m using CS3) & bring in your TIFF file.
2.       Duplicate your background image (Ctrl + J or Command + J on a Mac).
3.       Go to Filter => Topaz Labs => Topaz Adjust. This will open the file into Topaz Adjust.

Screen Shot of Launching Topaz Adjust (click to view larger)

4.       I also use a Preset that I’ve made and saved and I usually make minor adjustments to it to fit each shot. Here are the settings that I begin with:

• Adaptive Exposure – 0.37
  
• Regions – 12
  
• Contrast – 0.00
  
• Brightness – 0.00
  
• Highlight – 0.04
  
• Shadow – 0.00
  
• Strength – 1.93
  
• Boost – 1.00
  
• Threshold – 0.15
  
• Radius – 25.00
  
• Sharpen – 1.80
  
• Check “Process details independent of exposure”
  
• Adaptive Saturation – 0.00
  
• Regions – 1
  
• Saturation – 1.00
  
• Saturation Boost – 1.00
  
• Hue – 0.00
  
• Check “Use Topaz DeNoise”
  
• Suppression – 1.04
  
• Amount – 0.78
  

5.       Then click “OK” which will start the process of applying your settings to the shot.
6.       I then duplicate the top layer again (Ctrl + J or Command + J on a Mac).
7.       Go to Filter => Other => High Pass and choose a setting of 3.2. Now this will turn your picture grey, but don’t worry.

Adding High Pass Layer (click to view larger)

Don't worry about your picture turning gray when first adding the High Pass filter (click to view larger)

8.       Now change the Blending Mode from Normal to “Overlay”. This just adds a bit of sharpening to the shot after the reduction of noise applied by Topaz DeNoise. If you want more sharpening then duplicate the high pass layer. Likewise if it’s too much then adjust the opacity.

Note: If you have sky in your shot you may want to mask out the extra detail created by the High Pass layer.

9.       Go to Image => Mode => 8 Bits/Channel.
10.   Then save out in the desired format.
11.   Last but not least, if you want to make any adjustments to the colors I always use Adobe Camera RAW, and sometimes I'll add a Level Adjustment layer for greater contrast.

The Final Results

I used to stop after processing the file in Photomatix but in experimenting I started adding the Topaz Adjust step. Once I did it once, I’ve always stuck with it. You can see the vast difference between the file that came straight out of Photomatix and the final version that has been ran through Topaz Adjust as well. 

Here are a few more examples of Photomatix processed shots and shots which were then ran through Topaz Adjust.