HDR

Martron

what are the best colours to aim to have in a hdr shot. using photomatix and i do find greens and oranges pop. but i find blues and red go flat.

or what is an ideal condition for a hdr shots

brianmacl

Martron wrote: »

what are the best colours to aim to have in a hdr shot. using photomatix and i do find greens and oranges pop. but i find blues and red go flat.

or what is an ideal condition for a hdr shots

it all depends on your settings in Photomatix, are you doing expossure blending, HDR with tone compression or enhancer? and what settings are you using?

Martron

ah you see i am not sure.

just beginning at this and just fiddling with the setting until something good comes out.

DutchGuy

I'm wondering whether you are approaching this in the wrong way. You ask what the ideal conditions are for an HDR shot; but imo a better question would be in what conditions do I need to use HDR techniques/software. HDR is designed to deal with scenes where the dynamic range (the range of brightness levels in a scene) is too high to be able to register well on one shot. See example below:



As you can see the foreground is underexposed but the sky is slightly overexposed. So I used HDR of three shots to change to:



The second image was process for dynamic range in Photomatix, but as some of colours were not quite right/saturated enough I adjusted the hue/saturation levels for those colours in Lightroom.

So I suppose to offer a solution to your original problem of certain colours not "popping" enough I would suggest to merge your photos to increase the dynaimc range using the software of your choice and then fine tune them for the colours afterwards.

Oh, and try to keep it subtle(ish); it's easily overdone:)

Martron

you explained my question perfectly.

so you took 3 shots of the same subject . what did you alter between the shots? the exposure?

can you do this with the white balance or do you need to alter it with exposure levels. ( or am i talking about the same thing?)

Thanks

DutchGuy

Yeah I changed the exposure between each shot - basically mounted the camera on a tripod set a small aperture to ensure everything was in profile and an exposure level to match (if you put your camera in aperture priority that should work). Then set automatic bracketing on the camera to take three pictures with the shutter speed about 1.5 stops either side of the mid range value. Not sure what camera you have but your manual should explain how to do that. If you're not sure about aperture/shutter speed have a read of this. Or as many people would recommend buy the writer's book "understanding exposure" which will explain a lot.

White balance is something completely different by the way - it is to do with the temperature of the light. Or to give an example if your indoor photo's have a yellowish cast to them that's because the white balance is not set to compensate for the yellow light from lightbulbs.

Martron

i have a sony a200.

i have bracketing on the camera. i must try it out so.

basically set it to apeture priority and then bracketting. ok will try it out. thanks for the help.