waterloo falls workflow
welcome to the first of hopefully many tutorials on thinsite. i often get the same questions from different people so in the spirit of sharing i’m going to offer full disclosure on how some of the images on thinsite are created from beginning to end. bitchin’!
capturing hdr shots
technically, a tripod will make any hdr shot better, but i really hate using a tripod so i’ll often just machine gun it if there’s enough light to handhold three quick shots. in a situation like this there’s no way i could get away with handholding it so out came the tripod and remote. i set my bracket as wide as my camera will go and manually underexposed by a 1 1/3 stops cause in this shot there was only about a half hour left of light and wanted to capture the fact that it was sunset.
 overexposed by 1/3 stop |
 underexposed by 1 1/3 stops |
 underexposed by 3 stops |
some tips:
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it’s important to remember that if you capture the original bracketted shots as raw then when converting your raw file you gotta make sure that your raw processor doesn’t go willy nilly adjusting stuff for you. the only thing that should be consistent from shot to shot is the white balance and the sharpening and by sharpening i mean don’t sharpen it. that’s the last step.
merging your bracketted shots into a single hdr exposure
everytime that i’ve tried photoshop’s merge to hdr feature i’ve been underwhelmed by the results so i wouldn’t bother with it. go ahead and load up photomatix and open your three exposures. press ctrl-g to merge to hdr. let photomatix do it’s thing and you’ll end up with a terrible looking exposure. don’t panic. go to the hdri menu and choose tone mapping.
there are a whack of settings you can adjust and truth be told i usually just fiddle until the exposure looks the way i want it to. typically i’ll set smoothing to high which is what i think a lot of the flickr hdr group forget to do. when the smoothing is medium or low it creates terrible halos usually… well, at least in my experience. typically i think hdr shots end up with too much colour saturation so i’ll pull back on the strength and colour saturation sliders to make the shot look less like a candy wonderland.
here are the options i used for this particular shot. the options have been reorganized a bit to make it fit better in this tutorial.
and the result:
save it as a tiff and fire up photoshop.
post processing in photoshop
at this point i’m not at all happy with the image. it looks like bad flea market art that i wouldn’t spend a dime on so it’s time to touch it up a bit with photoshop to create the mood that i think is more in line with the shot.
i’ll outline the reason and result behind each adjustment layer, but for now here’s the final photoshop pallette:
and now the nitty gritty
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selective color adjustment layer: i often start with a selective colours adjustent layer to adjust the black level of each colour. most times i’ll only adjust the black levels of the black and white colours, but in this case i adjusted most colours cause i find that hdr shots can often look soupy and not have enough separation between the different colours of the spectrum. this isn’t an exact science so just play with it until you’re happy with the results. here’s what i used: reds +100%, yellows +30%, greens 0%, cyans +45%, blues +100%, magentas +100%, whites -50%, neutrals 0%, black +100% |
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gradient map adjustment layer: this part might seem a bit counter productive because in the previous step i made the colours richer and now i’m about to take a bunch of colour out, but really the purpose of the previous step was to create better separation of colours not stronger hues.i like using a black to white gradient map to desaturate an image. it always does a better job than the actual desaturate command. i adjust the opacity of this layer to 60% so that there’s still lots of colour coming through.
unfortunately this took more of the reds and yellows out than i wanted so set the opacity of my brush to 25% and painted some of the reflections on the water back in. |
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levels adjustment layer: the levels adjustment layer was a bit of an afterthought cause i wasn’t satisfied with the depth of the black in the shot so i just pulled in the shadow input level to 20 |
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gradient fill adjustment layer: i think the downfall of a lot of hdr images is the terrible halo effect that often shows up between the highlight and the shadow. there wasn’t much of it in this shot and to be prefectly honest the sun was setting in the direction of the shot so there was a natural gradient to the sky when i photographed it, but still, i didn’t like the sky as it was and i wanted to darken it a bit.i created a linear gradient fill from black to transparent starting at the top of the frame. the scale is set to 50% cause there wasn’t that much sky showing and with the palette open i positioned the gradient towards the top of the frame. the overlay method is set to hard light but the effect is too strong so i turned down the opacity to 40%. because of the treeline a lot of the gradient spilled into the foreground which looks really odd so a layer mask is required to separate the foreground from the background. |
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colour fill adjustment layer: the image is quite blue at this point which is not much like it was in real life where it was mostly lit by incandescent street lights so i wanted some warmth put back into the shot.
the colour fill adjustment layer is a warm brown (r175 g82 b0) with opacity set to 40% and the overlay method set to soft light. |
the final step was to create a touch of a vignette, but i’ll skip over that part cause it’s pretty simple and maybe i’ll cover it in another mini tutorial.
resizing / sharpening for posting to the web
after i’m satisfied with the outcome (sometimes doesn’t happen) i resize to whatever size is suitable for posting on the web. the image is resized to 900×600 using the bicubic method cause i don’t trust photoshop’s bicubic sharper method. i’ll handle the sharpening thank you very much photoshop.
this image looks susceptible to those nasty halos that often show up where the foreground meets the background so in cases like this i’ll duplicate the image and sharpen the duplicated layer.
using the smart sharpen tool i normally set the sharpening amount to 85% with a radius of 1px. i then tweak the shadow and highlight sharpening to create a subtle but sharp look. in this particular case shadow sharpening is set to 20% fade amount, 50% tonal width, and 1 px radius. the highlight sharpening as pictured below is set to 20% fade amount, 70% tonal width, and 1 px radius.
now we’ve got a sharpened image with halos on top of the unsharpened image. next, on the sharpened layer i use my eraser tool to trace along the edges of the halos that i want to remove thereby allowing the unsharpened edges of the original image come through. that’s it. now it’s saved and ready for the glory that is the thinsite photoblog.
June 1st, 2006 at 8:59 am
What a fantastic resource this is! How thoughtful of you to put this together for your visitors. Just from a quick look, I see that I have much to learn about using Photoshop. Also FYI I am using Firefox and everything looks great on the page. One last admission. I finally figured out that the Waterloo that you have mentioned is NOT Waterloo, Iowa. So I guess I’ll have to postpone my little summer outing to see the lovely ‘brewery’ lofts until I can figure out where this Waterloo is located.
June 1st, 2006 at 11:24 am
This really is wonderful. Thank you so much for starting a tutorial, and just as lois said it seems I have alot to learn about photoshop also. I’m definatly looking forward to more tutorials. And the page is looking great. Thanks again!
June 1st, 2006 at 1:38 pm
How dare you posting all this valuable info on the net??? Just kidding man! This is just sóóó friendly of you, and to be honest, it’s very well explained, just detailed enough for a PSP-user to know where he stands (looking at the 2 previous comments
I haven’t been playing around much with Photomatrix, maybe a dozen of pictures were processed with it till now, not even all posted. But i have to say, it opens up another world. I just bought a new D50 from Nikon after a very long quiet photoperiod - i did art-academy in a previous life.
But a tutorial like this really inspires for a move forward into photomatrix and even deeper in PSP.
And i almost forgot…. damn killer-picture you made here!
June 3rd, 2006 at 12:23 pm
Awesome tutorial. nice of you to share this. thank you.
June 4th, 2006 at 5:37 pm
Thanks for sharing!
I’m going to give that a try in the next few days. Normally I hardly post process
June 6th, 2006 at 11:12 am
Great man.
Maybe I’ll learn to make a decent shot.
thank
June 12th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
This is killer. Thanks so much for sharing your techniques.
June 17th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
This is brilliant. Thank you very much for taking the time to put this together. It’s greatly appreciated.
Any chance of a tutorial coming out for the curves tool?.. *Flutters eyelashes in your direction*
June 21st, 2006 at 2:57 pm
I am sitting here at work and would like to play around with HDR photo making, but I don’t have any photos. You wouldn’t consider putting up a few sample images to work with, would you? Or maybe you know where I could get a few?
July 22nd, 2006 at 1:27 am
Oh,what a beautiful blog! I like it very much! I’m agreeable to your point of view!
my name is 反应釜 I hope to make feiends with you !
July 29th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
[…] One of the amazing things about that photo, which I didn’t realize at first, is that the sky AND the inside of the wall is correctly exposed. If you’ve ever try to shoot a nice blue sky before, you know that to keep that nice blue color you can’t expose it too long. But if you do that, then the wall would be horribly underexposed. So what you do is take several shots at different exposures and merge them in an HDR image. You do that with Raw Shooter Essentials, found here and it looks like it’s FREE! Then you do some other adjusting in your photo editing program of choice, (Paul uses CS2), and when you’re done you have this amazing WOW kind of image. Paul sent me to this website for a great tutorial on how to create nice HDR images. Check out this adjustment Paul made on The Man. Pretty wild. However, I am still debating the “ethics” of all that photoshopping. Anyway, thanks a lot, Paul! […]
January 8th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
[…] Tutorial which covers the postprocessing of HDR’s I just stumbled upon this goodie: A HDR tutorial which also covers some ideas about postprocessing a HDR in Photoshop. […]
January 9th, 2007 at 4:22 am
I put a link this great tutorial on my HDR blog: http://hdri.wordpress.com/
January 30th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Sweet
February 14th, 2007 at 4:36 am
[…] Detras de esas siglas se esconde una tecnica para conseguir unas imagenes espectaculares donde se suavizan constrastes de luz. […]
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your wonderful explanation and clarity ,sharing with everyone,you moved me ahead today as lover of art & graphics,bye jack.
May 28th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Can you send me more information about the single adjustament layer and their parameter of configuration?
Thanks and compliment for your picture is great beautiful!