Looking towards Yangminshan National Park. Two blended exposures.
High dynamic range or HDR photography has been very popular the past few years, with photographers such as Trey Ratcliff and David Nightingale leading the way. I use it from time to time but often find a simple exposure fusion of two differently exposed images works wonders and produces better results than the full HDR / tone mapping procedure. Today, I’m going to run through the steps involved in creating the above photograph. For this I used Lightroom and Photomatix. There are other programs that can be used as well, and I’ll look at them in a future post.
The first step is in the shooting. You need to take two exposures with different settings in order to be able to blend the exposures. The easiest way to do this is simply set your camera’s auto exposure bracketing function, and shoot away. Use of a tripod is highly recommended, however it’s sometimes possible to get acceptable results shooting handheld.
In Lightroom, I select my two images that I want to blend. I have HDRSoft’s Photomatix plugin installed in Lightroom, so I select it in the Export dialog and it will send the two images straight into Photomatix.
Exporting from Lightroom to Photomatix
A small dialog window opens giving me the option of generating an HDR image, blending exposure or opening the files only. I choose the blend exposure option. It includes a note letting you know that a default behavior can be set via the preferences. This would be useful if you always take the same action. The next step asks you to choose the files. Opening from Lightroom will have automatically selected them for you. You have the option to align them in a couple of different ways.
Source files
Options
After you hit OK, the following windows opens. You have five options for processing the final image, including Average and four different Highlights and Shadows Settings – Auto, Adjust (allows manual refinements), 2 Images and Intensive. Choose the one you feel looks best and click Process. The preview here is often a little darker than the final processed version.
Process Window
Once that’s done, you’re pretty much done. The only thing left is to save the image. You may want to re-import it into Lightroom – it doesn’t do so automatically – or Photoshop for some additional touch ups as you normally would. I added a tone curve in Lightroom to get my final photograph.
Looking towards Yangminshan National Park. Two blended exposures.
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