HDR photography
- Thread starter 20ducks
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My understand is you take 3 or more bracketed photos and Photoshop CS2 has a feature to merge the photos to help you make the most of your dynamic range under tricky lighting while still balancing this trade-off with contrast. If you are saying that the D80 has a built in feature to do that I can't help but that would be very kewl if it did... 8)
I am fairly certain the D80 does... I'm a canon man myself but i'm sure the Nikon is similar.
What you do is set the range for the bracketing (i.e. -1 to +1, or -2 to +2, depending on how much bracketing you wish to do). Once activated you take 3 pics every time. So, you set up your tripod and then take 3 sequential exposures. one will be -1, one normal and one +1. You can then manipulate these in Photoshop to get the HDR effect.
There are more reasons for using bracketing than HDR, so it is not always necessary to use the tripod, but for the HDR effect you should use a tripod.
What you do is set the range for the bracketing (i.e. -1 to +1, or -2 to +2, depending on how much bracketing you wish to do). Once activated you take 3 pics every time. So, you set up your tripod and then take 3 sequential exposures. one will be -1, one normal and one +1. You can then manipulate these in Photoshop to get the HDR effect.
There are more reasons for using bracketing than HDR, so it is not always necessary to use the tripod, but for the HDR effect you should use a tripod.
trust me guys... making HDR pics is not hard... it takes about 3-4 days to get decent at it... just be patient.
Once you get good at knowing what needs to done with HDR to get the right effect, on average it takes 5-10 minutes of time to adjust a image to get the results that you want.
Once you get good at knowing what needs to done with HDR to get the right effect, on average it takes 5-10 minutes of time to adjust a image to get the results that you want.
Do spread the exposures as wide as you can if you are using a built in auto exposure bracket feature. If you do some google searches on HDR you will find tons of info on the topic and I have see several articles suggesting you go as wide as 4 or 5 stops below a normal exposure and 4-5 above it. I mostly use manual mode on my camera so going that wide on the exposure bracketing is pretty easy to do.
I may go a little bit on the extreme side here, but I have my own camera (Canon 5D) set up with "Mirror lock" enabled so the first time the shutter is pressed the mirror swings up and out of the way and then on the second press the shutter actually releases. I have the camera on a tripod and use a remote shutter release so I can do the first button press and then wait a second or 2 for all camera motion to settle and then squeeze off the actual shot. I do this manually for each shot to make certain the the shots that are to be overlaid are as close as possible to being an exact match.
Any camera motion at all will detract from the quality of the final image you create with HDR.
Any camera motion at all will detract from the quality of the final image you create with HDR.
srhutch said:
+2. My camera does the same it takes 3 photos in continues mode. I am not sure what to do with the photo after I put it in Photoshop to get the kind of effects that are on some of the stuff I see posted here which I really like. :roll:
Yesterday I went to Ft Leavenworth and the National Cemetery at Leavenworth for some photo ops. I took what I think are HDR photos and will process them on CS3 and also Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 to see if the processing/results/ease of use has any advantages. See ya later...I hope.
I posted my first HDR attempt as my entry for August Photo competition in the Gallery forum: first HDR attempt