For today, I again updated the wallpapers selection on this blog. Again I added three new Dubai wallpapers, as usually in the 1920×1200 and the 1600×1200 resolution. Head over to the Wallpapers page to download them.
And don’t forget that there are many more wallpapers there :)
Few weeks ago I posted an article about how to use manual focusing, and today, let’s look at the second part of every photo, how to determine the base exposure. I will go over how I do it, so this may not be the best, or the exactly right way, but it always worked fine for me. Also, this is how I determine the exposure for HDR series, not for single exposures. For those I usually let the camera decide, with the default metering, and I just tweak the exposure up or down as needed.
I will show this on my Canon camera, so this may not work as exactly on different cameras. Also this is not so easy to explain, so feel free to ask if there are any questions.
Same as with manual focusing, I also determine the exposure in live view. Most cameras have only few modes how to determine the exposure, and these fall into two categories. Either there look at the whole image, or they look only at the center of the image and base the exposure on that. In neither of those you can specify a specific point for the camera to look at, without moving the camera. So neither of those works for my workflow.
What I do is to get the composition (usually through the viewfinder), go into live view, focus, set the exposure and take the shots. So how to get the exposure for a specific area? Simple. But first be sure to be in the Manual mode (M), so you can set it, not the camera.
So to get the exposure for a certain area, go into Live view, and you will see a square on your screen. This is the square you zoom into when you zoom in live view, but it also determines the area for the exposure. If you try to move it around, you will see that the image on the screen changes brightness based on where the square is. So it always adapts, to show the proper exposure for that area.
So using this, you can choose the area for the exposure. Now you just need to find the values for this. To do this, you have to half press the shutter button and let go. What this does is, that it meters the exposure (normally it also focuses, but usually this is not done in live view, and also if you use manual focusing, this is turned off). After this is done, the camera will start showing the exposure under the live view (the small scale from -2 to +2). You can now change the aperture and time, to move the exposure to the 0EV position on the scale.
So now you know how to get an exposure for a specific area of a photo. Now the next decision is to choose the area of the photo. I tend to select the darkest area of the scene. This is because I want to have a good starting point, that is easy to find. Trying to find the middle exposure is just much harder, than just going directly for the darkest one. In the photos in this post, I outlined the areas I chosen for the exposure. There are of course also scenes, with very even brightness, then the area does not madder.
So when I do that, I know, the 0EV will have nicely exposed shadow areas. From this point, I usually take the -2EV to +2EV, but usually just the +1EV is enough. As the shadows are nicely exposed in the 0EV, the +1Ev give enough detail in them and the +2EV is just to be safe, as in some scenes, there are very dark shadows, that cant be selected in live view.
For the brightest areas, the -2EV is usually plenty enough, but when shooting into the sun, I tend to also include the -3EV (very rarely the -4EV)
One of course can go also the other way, trying to choose the brightest spot, but in my experience, it’s easier to find the darkest one. Also, by selecting the darkest spot, you get a brighter image on the screen, which makes for easier focusing.
When using Magic lantern, it’s very easy to just take the number of exposures one needs. But when only doing 3 with the AEB of a camera and using my approach to choosing the base exposure, I would suggest setting it a little lower than 0EV (so the line is a little to the left). This is because, as I mentioned, the +2EV is not really that important, as the photo is already exposed for the shadows. So pushing it a little lower, lets say -2.5EV, -0.5EV and 1.5EV series, will give you a better result.
So this is how I choose the exposure. Not the simplest way, but after years of doing it this way, it take me seconds to focus and select the exposure. The more one does it, the faster it goes :)
Feel free to ask if you have any questions, and to find out more how to create HDR photos, check out my HDR tutorial and my video tutorial series Master Exposure Blending.
As every Monday, today’s post will be again about one of my photos, and how it was edited. For today I chosen a photo from the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, so let’s take a look at it.
First here you have the final and the original photo. As you can see the difference between the bright and the dark areas in this one, was just huge.
So for this one, I had to take a little more exposures. As you can see I took 7, but I managed to take them a little more to the darker side than I wanted. But still I got enough information to work with. First I loaded them all into Lightroom, where I corrected the distortion, white balance and removed the chromatic aberrations.
From there I exported all the files as 16-bitt tiff files and combined them in Oloneo Photoengine. As it usually is, with white walls and very high dynamic range, the result was not the best, so it needed to be edited a lot more in Photoshop. So I loaded all the original exposures and the Photoengine result into Photoshop and continued from there. (Layers numbered from bottom up)
1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. +2EV exposure, set to Lighten mode and 37% opacity, to recover the white parts of the image
3. 0EV exposure, set to Lighten, to brighten few more spots.
4. +2EV again, with a hand painted mask, to remove the ghosting from the reflection in the water. As the water was not completely still, there was a little movement between photos.
5. Merged layer, to remove few spots from the photo.
6. +1Ev exposure, with a hand painted mask, to recover parts of the center (they lost some contrast in the HDR merge)
7. Color Efex pro contrast, to get more detail in the photo
8-9. Added glow to the photo, to make the bright areas shine more
10. Color balance to make the photo a little warmer
11. A little more contrast to the shadow areas, to make them a little darker, as the photo looked too artificial.
And here you can see the Oloneo Photoengine result and a screenshot from Photoshop.
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:
Even after years of it’s being used, HDR is still not properly known and understood between photographers. So to make it at least easier for some of you, in this post I will be going exactly what it is and why it is used. I will also go through few additional questions, that are close to the subject.
I will avoid being too technical, and try to explain things as simple as possible.
HDR stands for Hight Dynamic Range. It’s used to describe photos, where different techniques have been used, to expand the dynamic range ,to cover the whole available range of the scene.
For instance in photos like these two:
Foreground would be black without HDR
The sky would be white without HDRIn simplest terms, the dynamic range is the difference between the brightest and the darkest point. In a scene, it’s the difference between the brightest light and the darkest shadow. In a camera, it the difference it can capture in a single photo.
When you look at something, your eye moves rapidly, and adopts to all light sources very quickly. Like that you can see a very high dynamic range, as you don’t see it all at once. In comparison, a camera has to get the whole range in one shot.
DRI stands for Dynamic Range Increase and EDR stands for Extended Dynamic Range. Both have the same goal than HDR to increase the dynamic range of a photo, but the names are commonly used when using different techniques than tone-mapping software. Mostly when using luminance masks, one talks about DRI or EDR.
Again, in simplest terms, it’s because a camera cannot capture the whole dynamic range of a scene in one photo. But to get a better understanding, let’s look at an example.
Here are two photos from scenes with different dynamic ranges. The first one has a very small dynamic range (the difference between the dark and bright spot is very small), the second one has a big dynamic range (the difference is huge).
Scene with a small dynamic range
Scene with a big dynamic range
To visualize this, lets look at the dynamic ranges as bars, going from the darkest to brightest point. The sizes are just as illustration, so the proportions are not exact.
Like this you can visualize, what everything one needs to capture in a photo. As the one with the small difference is easy to capture in one photo, lets continue only with the second one.
Now let’s compares what we get when capturing the scene with a dynamic range of a 8-bit jpeg and with a RAW file, which is usually 14-bit. You can see, that the dynamic range of the scene can be much bigger. Even with the bigger range of the RAW, you loose a lot of information. Everything that is cut off, on the sides, turns to complete black or white.
If we looked at a JPEG photo and a RAW photo in comparison, it looks like this (the dark parts in the RAW photo have been brightened, the bright parts darkened, so it can be shown on an 8-bit screen)
JPEG photo
RAW photo
So how to capture the whole dynamic range of a scene? This is where bracketing comes in. One takes multiple exposures, each one capturing a part of the full scene. It can be visualized like this:
The brackets are overlapping, and each one covers a different part of the dynamic range of the scene. It can even extend more, but that parts will contain no information.
These photos can then be put together into a 32-bit HDR file, that can contain this whole range at once. This file is used only as a step in photo editing, as it can’t be correctly displayed on a screen. It’s mostly used only in 3D modeling.
What can be normally shown on a screen is a 8-bit file (there are 16-bit screens, but there are not commonly used). Most JPG files are 8-bit. So what is needed, is to use a any of the available techniques, to compress the dynamic range in the 32-bit file, until it fits into a 8-bit one (or a 16-bit one as a middle step). This can be visualized as this:
So what is used to do this? Any number of techniques. Manual blending, HDR tonemapping, just brightening the dark parts and darkening the bright parts and many more. Once this is finished, the dynamic range in the photo is the same of the one that can be shown on a screen.
The goal of all this is to get from a scene with a very high dynamic range, to a photo that can be shown on a normal screen.
Scene with a big dynamic range
Final HDR with few additional editsWell, yes it is. All the cameras take multiple exposures, to get the whole dynamic range, and combine them into one shot. Especially mobile phone cameras have a horrible dynamic range, and this can help a lot. Of course the biggest difference between this and doing this on your own, is that this process is fully automated and you have very little or no control of it.
HDR look, or we can also call it HDR style, is a certain look of a photo, that is quite often mistaken for HDR. It’s usually characterized by very saturated color and very strongly defined details, so called grunge look. But don’t be mistaken. This looks has nothing to do with the photo being a High dynamic range image. It can be done with any image, and is often just created using post-processing filters like Color Efex or Topaz Adjust.
It depends all on the photographer, if he wants to go with his editing style into this area or wants to go more towards realistic results.
Here are two of my photos, one with a more stylized HDR style, one with a more natural style. Both are HDRs, and as you can see, the final look has almost nothing to do with it. It’s all depended on the style one wants to create.
More stylized HDR style
More natural HDR style
And that’s all for this post. Feel free to ask if you have any questions, and to find out more how to create HDR photos, check out my HDR tutorial and my video tutorial series Master Exposure Blending.
As every Monday, it’s time for a new Before/After processing post. For today I chosen a little more compolicated photo to show you, so this post will include a lot of images. So let’s get started :)
First let’s take a loot at the final photo and the 0Ev raw file I started with. Today it’s a photo of the Dubai fountain.
As you can see, in the original 0EV there was no fountain. That’s because I taken a separate series of 6 exposures, when the fountain was off, to get the background, and then a long series of shots exposed for the fountain, to blend in. So here you can see the 6 exposures, and the huge amount of the fountain shots.
From the 6 exposures, I created a HDR in Oloneo photoengine, as my base. I then selected three additional photos, two for the fountain, and one for the people in the foreground. You can see on the photos, that I tweaked them in Lightroom, so they better fit into the Oloneo Photoengine result.
And here you can see which parts from those photo I ended up using. This are the layers from the final HDR, numbers 4, 5 and 6 in the list bellow. Btw, you probably noticed, that there are nice shots of the fountain I haven’t used, but they are planed for another edit of this photo :)
So I loaded all the original exposures, the Oloneo Photoengine result and the three additional photos into Photoshop layers, and continued with following edits (numbered from bottom up):
1. Olone Photoengine result
2. -2EV to darken few bright light in the distance
3. 0EV to correct a little ghosting in few trees
4+5+6. Blended in parts of the fountain and the people in the foreground (as seen in the screenshots above)
7. Noise reduction for the whole photo except for the sky, so no color banding is created.
8+9. Added contrast to the whole photo.
10. Color balance to give the photo a little more cooler, bluish look.
11+12. Added glow (check out my tutorial on this)
13. Brightened the dark areas, as they got too dark after the glow was added (check out my video on this)
14. Removed few unwanted objects in the foreground.
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:
