This HDR shot was processed using Photomatix 4 with the 3 above shots and then finished with Photoshop CS5 as you can see the amount of detail, tonal range and depth created in HDR photography are much greater than would be achieved by a single shot.
When you import your photos into your HDR program (i use Photomatix) and process them you will find a range of preset HDR effects to choose from, some will give you photo realistic images others will give you surreal images you will see controls on the side bar and you can make adjustments to the photo to give it the look you are after.
When you create a HDR image you are happy with, save it in the default format setting (photomatix uses TIFF), from the 3 RAW images of 20 to 22 megabyte each, a HDR TIFF image can be around 100 megabytes when be created. The final size of the image will depend on the mega pixal range of your camera.
The next step I follow is to import the HDR image into Photoshop CS5 do any cropping of the HDR image and clean up any artefacts in the image that didn’t process correctly, or are distracting, a common one I find in landscapes are birds flying that cause black dots and streaks in the sky that need to be removed.
Once I’ve cropped and cleaned the HDR photo, the next thing is to duplicate the image and apply the high pass filter to the image then changing the setting in the layers window from normal to hard light and adjusting the opacity to between 50 to 70 percent this lifts the image visually, next thing is to flatten the image and then save it to the format you like.
Finally if I'm not happy with the result, such as the sky may not be blue enough, I will run it through NIK Efex pro to make the final adjustments to the HDR photo..
HOW TO DO HDR PHOTOGRAPHY
The 3 photos below show the bow of an old ship taken early in the morning at sunrise, do not do any editing or correcting to your photos before you create your HDR photograph, to do so will affect the finished HDR image.
The camera was tripod mounted with mode set to AV (aperture priority setting) and set to use the RAW format with AEB enabled and the shutter set to timer with a 2 sec. Delay. The first shot was at the correct exposure as metered by the camera the next exposure is at +3 stops, which is followed by -3 stops.
You can take more shots with different expose corrections of +/- 1 stops to use to create your HDR photograph depending on the subject and how you wish to handle it.
Once you get back to your computer and uploaded the images. Then sort the images into folders so they are easier to locate them for importing into your HDR editing program.
