Sky Pictures
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If you want to find one sure photography topic that will give you endless great shots then just look up (you’re outside right?). On a good cloudy day the sky changes by the minute and presents to you a multitude of shapes and colours. Throw in the sun for good measure and you can capture something real special. I found myself looking skywards after my climb of Ben Bulben. It was extremely windy, and I can not over-emphesise how windy, so my interest soon turned from making myself dizzy looking up to not falling off the edge of the mountain. In spite of my near death experience I did take three not too shabby shots of the sun passing across my lens – I was standing in the same position and merely shifted my lens to reposition the sun. TA-DAA! I also did a little touching up on them – I altered the curves to darken the darks and lighten the lights, and also saturated the blues and yellows a little to bring out the colour in the sky and sun. As soon as I get home to my camera I think I’ll start a sky portfolio of sorts – look out for more sky pictures as they happen…
Sky Pictures: One
Sky Pictures: Two
Sky Pictures: Three
22 Tutorials For Creating High Dynamic Range Photographs Using Photoshop / Photomatix
HDR photography has become quite popular in recent years. Some people like the over the top trippy acid looking results one can get with Photomatix (although Photomatix isn’t limited to this), while others prefer the greater flexibility and reputed more realistic results that can be got from Photoshop. To help yourself, and myself, see how weblogs approach HDR I’ve put together a list of 22 tutorials / guides that explain the process, from the basic drag and drop approaches to the more complicated post-processes one can do following tonemapping. Some of these guides you may have seen before, others are less popular, but they all offer something new for everyone.
1. Vanilla Days
This is a very popular HDR tutorial and compares the capabilities of Photoshop against Photomatix, concluding that Photomatix gives more control over the final image. It explains the essentials – auto-bracketing, merging and tone mapping. What makes this tutorial stand out from others is that is explains in good detail the tone mapping options available in Photomatix and provides results for different Photomatix settings. It also makes a lot of comparisons: using 1 RAW versus 3 RAWS, using jpgs instead of RAWS and direct comparisons between Photoshop and Photomatix. If you’re interested in creating HDRs this tutorials should definitely be in your bookmarks.
2. PopPhoto
This post, by Jack Howard, is a whopping 11 pages long and explains pretty much everything you need to know about putting together HDRs. With such depth you expect to gleam some nuggets of information – I knew Photomatix had exposure blending capabilities but I didn’t realise how limited they actually were until I read this. Like before, Photomatix and Photoshop are compared and the strengths and weaknesses of both are listed; quite useful if you’re in two minds over which one to buy. At the end of this tutorial there is a useful tips page listing a methodology for producing the best HDRs possible.
3. BackingWinds
Backing Winds is a blog maintained by Ryan McGinnis. He shows us how to create realistic looking HDRs using Photoshop – and definitely a guy whose against the ‘misuse’ that often occurs when creating HDRs with Photomatix (see a post of mine for an example!). His post is a great resource for anyone interested in using Photoshop, simply because it’s such a huge package and is less accessible than Photomatix – it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by Photoshops 19000 options! Ryan also give some pointer on adding those crucial finishing touches using Histogram and curve adjustments – very useful!
4. GrindGod
GrindGod has a very well layout guide, starting from the top with telling us the equipment we need to get started before getting into more detail with the various options that Photomatix provides. One flaw with this guide however is that there are no images describing the steps or showing any HDR examples.
5. CameraLabs
CameraLabs is a forum and this is simply a post on it, but it’s one heck of a post! The interesting thing about this post is that it was the guys first attempt, and it’s a very good one! There are pictures to go with every step also so it’s very easy to follow. The actual settings are shown so you have some benchmark settings that should work reasonably well to start with. This is a great tutorial for novices; however because it’s a posting on a forum there’s no guarantee that it will remain there long term – sometimes forum topics or posts can be removed either by the administration or the poster so if you find this guide useful it would be worthwhile saving it to your computer.
6. The 23x Blog
Another good tutorial, it has nothing new over the five previous ones but hey, it’s good to check out it’s work if HDR is your passion! It does have some great results – I love the photo of the boats (right) that is shown on the site. Right now I dream of being able to make a photo this good! It gives some essential tips such as using the same aperture for each shot – a lot of other tutorials seem to overlook this point. The author also has a link to their Flickr page where you can see more images.
7. Popsci
This guide has over 1500 Diggs since May 2007 so has proven very popular. It first describes what exactly a HDR image is, before showing us the differently exposed thumbnails that will be used for the final image. It then describes the two main programs used to create the HDR: Photoshop and Photomatix before describing a little what tone mapping is and finally comparing the original photo to the final tone mapped image. It also comments on an open source alternative, Qtpfsgui, available on Windows, MAC OSX and Linux.
8. Digital Camera Resource Page
This is another guide posting on a forum. It highlights the problem many people will have if they are creating HDR images from multiple RAW files – aligning of the source files. According to the guide Photomatix cannot align wide angle shots very well and so it recommends using a program called PTGui. It will warp and align each picture to match up perfectly with each other – handy if you don’t have a tripod nearby! The guide is quite detailed – it provides the original under- metered and over-exposed images, it provides the settings used to create the HDR and explains how the settings in Photomatix affect the final results – a good tutorial to check out.
1. Vanilla Days
This is a very popular HDR tutorial and compares the capabilities of Photoshop against Photomatix, concluding that Photomatix gives more control over the final image. It explains the essentials – auto-bracketing, merging and tone mapping. What makes this tutorial stand out from others is that is explains in good detail the tone mapping options available in Photomatix and provides results for different Photomatix settings. It also makes a lot of comparisons: using 1 RAW versus 3 RAWS, using jpgs instead of RAWS and direct comparisons between Photoshop and Photomatix. If you’re interested in creating HDRs this tutorials should definitely be in your bookmarks.2. PopPhoto
This post, by Jack Howard, is a whopping 11 pages long and explains pretty much everything you need to know about putting together HDRs. With such depth you expect to gleam some nuggets of information – I knew Photomatix had exposure blending capabilities but I didn’t realise how limited they actually were until I read this. Like before, Photomatix and Photoshop are compared and the strengths and weaknesses of both are listed; quite useful if you’re in two minds over which one to buy. At the end of this tutorial there is a useful tips page listing a methodology for producing the best HDRs possible.3. BackingWinds
Backing Winds is a blog maintained by Ryan McGinnis. He shows us how to create realistic looking HDRs using Photoshop – and definitely a guy whose against the ‘misuse’ that often occurs when creating HDRs with Photomatix (see a post of mine for an example!). His post is a great resource for anyone interested in using Photoshop, simply because it’s such a huge package and is less accessible than Photomatix – it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by Photoshops 19000 options! Ryan also give some pointer on adding those crucial finishing touches using Histogram and curve adjustments – very useful!4. GrindGod
GrindGod has a very well layout guide, starting from the top with telling us the equipment we need to get started before getting into more detail with the various options that Photomatix provides. One flaw with this guide however is that there are no images describing the steps or showing any HDR examples.
5. CameraLabs
CameraLabs is a forum and this is simply a post on it, but it’s one heck of a post! The interesting thing about this post is that it was the guys first attempt, and it’s a very good one! There are pictures to go with every step also so it’s very easy to follow. The actual settings are shown so you have some benchmark settings that should work reasonably well to start with. This is a great tutorial for novices; however because it’s a posting on a forum there’s no guarantee that it will remain there long term – sometimes forum topics or posts can be removed either by the administration or the poster so if you find this guide useful it would be worthwhile saving it to your computer.6. The 23x Blog
Another good tutorial, it has nothing new over the five previous ones but hey, it’s good to check out it’s work if HDR is your passion! It does have some great results – I love the photo of the boats (right) that is shown on the site. Right now I dream of being able to make a photo this good! It gives some essential tips such as using the same aperture for each shot – a lot of other tutorials seem to overlook this point. The author also has a link to their Flickr page where you can see more images.7. Popsci
This guide has over 1500 Diggs since May 2007 so has proven very popular. It first describes what exactly a HDR image is, before showing us the differently exposed thumbnails that will be used for the final image. It then describes the two main programs used to create the HDR: Photoshop and Photomatix before describing a little what tone mapping is and finally comparing the original photo to the final tone mapped image. It also comments on an open source alternative, Qtpfsgui, available on Windows, MAC OSX and Linux.8. Digital Camera Resource Page
This is another guide posting on a forum. It highlights the problem many people will have if they are creating HDR images from multiple RAW files – aligning of the source files. According to the guide Photomatix cannot align wide angle shots very well and so it recommends using a program called PTGui. It will warp and align each picture to match up perfectly with each other – handy if you don’t have a tripod nearby! The guide is quite detailed – it provides the original under- metered and over-exposed images, it provides the settings used to create the HDR and explains how the settings in Photomatix affect the final results – a good tutorial to check out.
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