Tutorial: Using HDR in Flat Light Scenes

High dynamic range photography has been the technique of choice for sometime now. This software allows you to create photographs that cover a higher dynamic range than either film or a single digital capture can handle. One example is architecture where photographers shooting interiors of various structures struggle to get the proper exposure for the inside while the windows are blown out, over exposed and lacking detail.

With HDR software you can shoot a series of bracketed exposures and then simply let the software combine them for a full dynamic range image. HDR software also has great potential for outdoor photography where you may have a bright sunny day creating extreme contrast in your scene. By bracketing series of exposures and again, allowing the software to combine them you can reduce contrast to a manageable ratio. Simply put, you can bring down the highlights brightness and open up shadows for a much more pleasing image.

The first thing you need to do is acquire software and the most popular is Photomatix. There are many others that work just as well. If you are someone who uses various different pieces of software and technology regularly then you will be aware of how useful it is getting help on the best things to use. Here is how to use it.

Getting The Correct Exposures

RAW Capture

For scenes that you photograph, first shoot an exposure that would be considered normal as well as exposures for your highlights and exposures for your shadows. To do that, meter your scene with your camera and set the normal exposure. Take one photograph and evaluate your histogram. Are the highlights and shadows within the “walls” on each end of your histogram? If so you have your normal exposure. If not, adjust your exposure to bring the highlights and shadows within the boundaries of your histogram no matter what you’re meter says. This now is your normal exposure and you can see it above.

Now you need to create lighter and darker exposures. Bracket only your shutter speed and not your aperture so that you are not changing depth of field, otherwise some frames may be sharper in some areas and softer in others.

I also frame my picture and turn off the autofocus so there could be no possibility that focus could change while I’m bracketing my exposures. So again, bracket only with your shutter speed! The normal exposure is on the left.

After the normal exposure, adjust your shutter speed in one stop increments for two frames that are two stops above the normal exposure.

Then go the other direction with darker images, one at -1 and one at -2. You should have five exposures one stop apart.
The Photomatix manual recommends only three exposures, normal, +2, and -2. I know based on extensive testing by my friend David at Chromasia, that you get less noise when you bracket your exposures in one stop increments instead of two stop increments.

Generate the HDR Image

Next, open Photomatix and click on Generate HDR, select the five files by clicking and click okay.

That opens a window called Generate HDR — Options and here you want to check “align source images.” Below that check “by correcting horizontal and vertical shifts”. At the bottom you see “raw conversion settings” and I leave the white balance ‘as shot’ and primary colors to Adobe RGB. Click okay and the software will create a high dynamic range image.

HDR Composite Image

Here is the HDR composite image before the tone mapping. They usually look pretty bad. The Tone Mapping will change that.

Click on the tone mapping button

Tone Mapping Palette

Then go to where it says Presets and make sure that default is set.

Here are the following steps that I do:

1) Slide the black point forcing the shadow side of the histogram to touch the left wall.
2) Slide the white point so that the histogram is just about to touch the right wall. Be careful to not force non-white areas to go white.
3) Go to the top of the palette and move strength all the way to 100.
4) Move color saturation to about 80.
5) Next, click on the micro-tab and move the micro-contrast all the way to the right or a total of 10.
6) Back to the top of the details enhancer palate I move Luminosity all the way to the left. The Luminosity slider lightens or darkens your shadows. Since this image was a tad bright when luminosity was zero I adjusted all the way to the left to darken the overall image.
7) Go to the light smoothing and basically test each one of these five little buttons to decide how much smoothing to apply to the image.

I usually find that all the way to the left is too unrealistic or illustrative looking. All the way to the right is more like a normal photograph. I play with the middle three buttons and often like the effect on the middle button.

After Tone Mapping

Here are the settings I chose and the look that I’m getting at the moment.

But I am far from done with this image. First problem: too much of a blue tint. So I select the color tab where I slide it to the right to around three and this reduces a little bit of a blue.

Tone Map Again

I could be finished now but I’m not going to because I have found is that you can tone map more than one time in Photomatix. You can in fact, tone map as many times as you want.

Tone mapping

So I click the Process button and process this first pass at tone mapping. This capture shows the first tone mapping effort and you can see it produces a dramatically different looking image.

One option is to stop here, save the image as a test, open up in Photoshop and fine tune the color, contrast, and sharpness.

Instead, I will go ahead and save the image but not close it out, then reopen it in tone mapping again by clicking on the tone mapping button on the left.

Round 2 of Tone Mapping

The image has been reopened in the tone mapping and looks completely different than the image after the first tone mapping pass and that’s because it reapplied the tone mapping settings again.

I will adjust the sliders as follows to achieve the look closer to where I originally was.

Notice the detail enhancer palate on the left side. You can see I readjusted several things:

1) Change the luminosity a bit.
2) Pulled the white point away from the wall.
3) Pushed the black point further to the right to force some clipping and a slight darkening of the image.
4) And I also adjusted the gamma this time to darken the image.

I’m quite happy with this final result in Photomatix. Next I will open the image up in Photoshop and I check contrast and adjust accordingly.

Final Image

I will also play with the color to get a little bit more, burn and dodge a few areas, and add a vignette using the lens correction tool..
High dynamic range techniques are fabulous for high dynamic range scenes and also work very well for low dynamic range subjects.

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Related Posts: Photographing the Old Homestead in HDR

Buy Photomatix here.

Books on HDR:

McCullough HDR

Nightingale HDR

Trey Ratcliff