There are some problems with HDR photos, and it’s sad that that’s how most HDR is characterized. And since I think, we all should strive for better results, and showing everyone that HDR can create stunning results if used correctly, here is a list of most common HDR mistakes, that I think one should avoid.

Before I get to the list, two more notes first. I will be using my older photos to illustrate the problems (as I did the mistakes myself at one time or another) so don’t expect any great photos here :). Secondly, if any of the results I describe here are the results you desire for your photos, that’s doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong, it just means you are going more towards the artistic HDR and that’s your decision. I would probably not like that, as I go more towards the realistic result, but again, style is very personal and is different for everyone, so keep doing what you like :).

That’s all for this, and let’s look at the list :)

1. Lost contrast

The most common problem I see all the time. It’s the result of what HDR is and why you actually using it. Just think about it. If you have a proper exposure for every part of the photo, there are no highlights and now shadows. And that’s actually what a HDR result is. But a photo like this is very bland and boring. Nothing stands out.

So the goal should be, that the shadow areas are still a little darker than the average area of the photo, and the bright areas are still a little brighter. With this, the contrast is still there, but you don’t have extremes. Also, the human eye is drawn to the highlight areas, and if you have none, it just moves randomly around the photo. And that’s not what you want.

Close to the lost of contrast, is also the lost of all shadows. There are very few instances when a scene has no shadows in it, and a photo looks just strange without any.

Missing all the contrast

Just too much color

2. Too many saturated colors

First of all, I think that you can have saturated colors in photos. There are enough examples of objects , that are just very colorful. But, if the whole photo consists only from strongly saturated colors, this is very tiring for the viewers eyes, and one can’t look at it for a longer time. If you include areas where the saturation is not so high, the eyes can move to them, and rest for a while.

So having a nice balance, between saturated and unsaturated color, is the best way to go.

3. Too much detail

Similar to the colors, one can have also to much detail. Not every part of the photo has to be super detailed, and if one wants to highlight the subject, it’s even better if the remaining areas are a bit less detailed, so they don’t pull the focus away from the main subject.

The human brain does not work in absolutes. It compares stuff. So something looks the sharpest when there is something blurry near by. Something looks detailed, when there is something less detailed near by. And actually same goes for color saturation.

Just too much detail

Light inversion

4. Light inversion

Another very often seen effect of HDR. This is when the dark parts of a the scene, are brighter than the light parts of the scene in the finished photo. This looks just strange and very artificial. If you want your photo to look realistic, the shadow areas should be darker than the light areas. Always.

5. Grey whites

This is also a classic result of HDR editing programs. What they do, is, that they try to darken the bright areas of a photo. But if an area is white, it can not be darkened while keeping it white, and from this the ugly grey color is created. Either don’t use HDR when taking photos of white objects, or blend the area back from the non-HDR photo.

The clouds should be much whiter

No real sense of composition

6. Forgetting about composition

Just making a photo HDR, will not make the composition better. If you are shooting a normal or a HDR photo, the first step should always be to decide the composition. If that’s bad, HDR editing will not make the photo better. Feel free to go over my list of composition tips for more.

7. Bokeh HDR

A place where HDR just looks ugly is bokeh. The reason is simple. Where bokeh created a soft transition between shapes, HDR usually creates a hard, very defined transition. It’s always better not to create HDR from the out of focus areas of a photo, or blend them manually, not by using any of the HDR tone-mapping software.

There is no need for detail in the Bokeh

The edit is visible everywhere

8. Processing artifacts

There are many HDR processing software and many techniques on how to blend images. Each of them can create really ugly artifacts in a photo, hard transition, strange shadows, out of place outlines and much more. Usually when one sees this, one needs to tone down the settings in the respective software or play more with the masks when manually blending. It’s hard to get rid of them, once they appear, so try to avoid them as much as possible.

Also, photography errors, like chromatic aberrations, not properly focused areas and noise, are more visible after HDR processing and should be dealt with before one even goes into HDR processing.

9. Using HDR when it’s not needed

As with every technique, HDR is not always needed. Don’t force HDR on every photo. Especially photos of people are a great example, for when to avoid it. Some photos just look better, when there are strong shadows, overexposed areas, and lost detail. Photos, where you just want to show a feeling or mood, are the ones where you usually just don’t need HDR

The mood would be enough without HDR

Overuse of Topaz Adjust

10. Using HDR filters

A filter named HDR is not the same as a HDR photo. They usually create very grungy, unrealistic looking, a lot of times ugly, results. Even the better ones, can’t really have the best results, if they don’t have the information they need in the image file. And usually when one uses a filter like this, one does not have the brackets required for the dynamic range.

I personally try to avoid these, as a real HDR looks always better.

11. Just going overboard

One can use anything while editing photos, but everything should be used sparingly. Just throwing a bunch of filters on a photo, and thinking that that will make it great, never works.

For instance this photo. It’s just so over the top in detail, colors, just everything. I actually still like it, but probably only because it’s old and I’m nostalgic about it :)

 
And that’s all for this post and feel free to ask if you have any questions.

I missed the opening hours in Basel Munster by few minutes (that happened to me a lot in Switzerland, everything just closes so early), but since the Cloister was still opened, I managed to get few photos there. I really liked the shapes the sunlight was creating on the floor, so that’s why I chosen this composition. Of course that made it a little more difficult in post-processing, and no HDR software works so great with such huge dynamic range, but overall, I’m quite happy with the result :). I also quite randomly took a behind the scenes shot while taking this photos, so I’m including it.

This is a HDR from 6 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

I was a little late when arriving to Zermatt, so I missed the last rail car by 10 minutes. And since I was not really in the mood to go up by foot, I stayed in Zermatt, taking a lot of photos from there. And luckily, the weather was just great, even if the sun was exactly next to the Matterhorn, so right in my shots. But since one still can get a nice shot into the shun, when using HDR, I managed to get a lot of nice shots. And here is the first one.

I used the technique of shading the sun with my hand here. You can read more about it in by How to remove Lens flares guide. Or just look at the Lightroom screenshot I’m including here, to see what I mean. For this one, I took two series of 5 exposures, one for the sun, one for the foreground. I created a HDR from both in Oloneo Photoengine and blended them together in Photoshop afterwards.

Some time ago I did a post with few tips for Oloneo Photoengine, and today lets look at few features of Lightroom, that you may have missed. Lightroom is for me one a very important software, and I think there isn’t a single photo on this blog that wasn’t edited in it to a certain degree. There are of course many more things in Lightroom, but that’s for next-time. So let’s get started :)

Btw. I’m including a lot of screenshots, as I think that any article about photos should include many of them. And same when talking about a software, one should include screenshots of what I’m talking about. So I hope you don’t mind.

1. Personalize the header

Ok, this one wont help you to make better photos, but give a little sense of the Litroom being more personal. It’s also great if you plan to share screenshots from Lighroom (like I did in this post :)). To change the header, just go under Edit / Identity plate setup. Btw. you can also make the selection menu in the top right bigger, which I find to be very useful.

2. Stop scrolling

As all the adjustment panels, are placed in one long list to the side of the photos, it can lead to a lot of scrolling and searching. Luckily, the creator of Lightroom noticed this problem, and you can switch to a so called solo mode. What this does, is, that all the panels are collapsed, and only one can be opened at a certain time. So anytime you open one, all others close automatically. This makes it so much easier to find what you need, with minimum of scrolling. To switch to the Solo mode, just right click on any empty space under the panels, or on a name of a panel and choose Solo mode.

3. Change the crop grid

Since all cropping in Lightroom is not permanent (you can change it at any time later), its a great tool for that. To make it easier, you can choose different overlays to help you with it. Options like thirds, golden ratio, golden spiral and more are available. To change this, first open a photo and choose Crop (in the Develop mode). After that you can go under Tools / Crop guide overlay to choose what you prefer.

4. Sync, sync, sync

Sync is the best feature in Lightroom. If you are not using it, you are using it wrong :). What sync does is to copy all the settings from one photo over to another (or to how many one needs). One can copy all, or only some of the settings. This is so useful when one edits HDR brackets, or timelapse series, or any other series of photos where you need to do the same edits. You can sync from the Develop module, but also from the Library one. There you can also sync metadata if you need to. It’s also possible, to just right click any image and choose Settings / Copy settings, and then paste it onto another image.

5. Stack photos

If you have a huge library of photos, grouping some of them into a stack can really help to get a better overview. At the start I tried to stack HDR series, but that just take too much time, so I setled to stacking timelapse series and HDR panoramas. You know, the 10+ series :). To stack photos, just select the ones you want and press Ctrl + G (Ctrl + Shift + G to unstack) or right click and use the options under Stacking. You will also notice that the highlighted photo (the one with a little whiter background) will be used as cover for the stack.

6. Create virtual copies

Another great thing that you can do Lightroom is to create Virtual Copies of your photos. What this does, it creates a copy in Lightroom, but you still have only one file on the HDD. So you can create multiple edits of the single photo, without having to duplicate the file. Again, can be very useful in blending, where you want to create a version for the highlights and another one for the shadows.

7. Double click to reset

Moving around slides can be so time consuming. But to make this faster, there are two things you can do. First is, when you want to reset a setting to default, just Double-click the name and it resets. The second is, when you want to move a slider only a very little, move you cursor above the number value (it will light up) and use the Up / Down keys, to adjust the value.

8. Hold Alt to see the clipping

This one is similar to how it works in Photoshop. If you hold Alt while draging on sliders, the photo changes, to show you where you are clipping highlights and shadows (change pixels to complete black or white). This is extremely helpful, when you are trying to set the black and the white points for a photo, or are trying to adjust the exposure, without loosing any information.

9. Export with the watermark

Especially if you need to export many photos at once, it can be very time consuming to add watermarks to all of them. Here is where this option comes in. You just create one (or select a picture to be applied) and use it as many times you want. You can even create presets for you watermarks, to make it even simpler. To get to this, just choose File / Export and look for the Watermarking option. I don’t use this for my landscape photos, but if I’m exporting photos, for instance from a party, this is what I do.

10. Load into layers in Photoshop

Another one that is great if you want to blend exposures in Photoshop. Just select the ones you need, right click and choose Edit in / Open as layers in Photoshop. This will export and load all the files into a single Photoshop file as layer. You can also merge panoramas, or into Photoshop HDR from here. If you don’t plan to use a program in between Lightroom and Photoshop (like Oloneo) this makes the process more straightforward and you create no exports you don’t need.

11. Create smart collections

If you have a huge library (like I have) creating smart collection will enable you to select photos from all over the place and have them in one shop. For instance. I like to have a collection of all already edited photos, so I can find them easily for my process posts. For that, each time I finish a photo, a give a 4 star rating to all the brackets. This is then automatically selected for that collection. I also include the year in the selection, as I have a separate one for different years. Of course you can create many different ones, one for photos from a certain location, one for you favorite photos, and many more.

And that’s all for this post, but don’t forget to check out all the other guides and tips posts. You can find a list in the sidebar. And if you have any question about this post, feel free to ask.

Since last I was traveling last week, there was no processing post. But since now I’m back home, let’s get back to them. For today I chosen a fireworks photo from Budapest, I posted not so long ago. It’s a single exposure, so a little different than most of the Before/after posts. And if you want to know more about how to take fireworks shots, check out my free eBook Capturing Fireworks. So lets get started :)

So first let’s look at the final and the starting photo. As you can see that the original was not so colorful, but just by changing the white balance, one can archive a color cast, that can really help the photo.

Final result

Original photo

From this photo, I created two version in Lightroom. The first one was to be used as input for Oloneo Photoengine, so I only cropped the image, removed a little noise and chromatic abberations. The second one, was to be used in blending in Photoshop, for the very bright fireworks. So for that one, I brightened also the darks, and darkened the highlights.

Oloneo Photoengine start

Lightroom edit

 
I then edited the one exposure in Oloneo Photoengine, adjusting just the strength and contrast. I then loaded it, together with both of the Lightroom edits into Photoshop and did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. The second Lightroom edit, from which I painted in the fireworks
3. The first Lightroom edit (the Oloneo input), from which I painted in the parliament
4. Merged layer, on which I removed few dust spots, and the tree in the corner.
5. Noise reduction on most of the photo.
6. Color Efex Tonal contrast filter, to get more contrast and detail into some parts of the photo, mostly the smoke from the fireworks.
7. Toned down the yellow color a little
8. A little overall contrast to the photo. I usually end with this, as the re-sizing and sharpening removes a little contrast.

Oloneo Photoengine result

Photoshop screenshot

 
And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here: