Peter Marin

To those people that enjoy shooting for HDR processing, ie: bracketed exposures, fed into Photomatix (mainly) and tweaked in Photoshop (mainly), here’s a technique that I’ve been dabbling with recently, which slightly deviates from the common tutorials we’ve all read about in various places around the net.

The most common route for producing HDR images IMO is to load your bracketed photos into Photomatix for alighnment and tonemapping, saving as either a jpeg or tiff (hopefully the latter). Then open in Photoshop to adjust contrast either by level or curves blah blah blah, save.
Voila, we are done.

The road I’ve taken deviates in a few places, I still leave the tonemapping part to Photomatix, but not the alighnment part at the start of the process.

Most folks stay away from Photoshop for HDR creation, but I found that PS (CS3) does a far better job of aligning the 3 bracketed exposures and also with producing the latent file that gets tonemapped.

So, here is how it works, for me anyway.
(It might be a good idea to mention that I’m using CS3 and not sure if other versions of CS do HDR or not.)
I load my 3 bracketed exposures into CS3 under File>Automate>Merge to HDR and then browse for the 3 files to be processed, then tick the Auto Align box .

When I have my 3 files just hit OK.
Photoshop will go through it’s auto process and stop with a latent image. I just accept what I have and hit OK again at this screen, then Photoshop will go through it’s merging process, ending up with a flattened image. This is the bit that I believe makes the difference. I save this file in EXR format and then close the file. Photoshop does a far better job of aligning images than Photomatix is capable of IMO, and the files prior tonemapping are less noisy IMO. Your mileage may differ, but from what I’ve trialed and produced I’m liking Photoshop for this job.

Next, I launch Photomatix and open my ‘EXR’ file I just made with Photoshop. Now I’m going to use Photomatix to do the tonemapping, as I normally would have done before. I save the t/m’ed file as a 16bit tiff and close the file and exit out of Photomatix.

The next two options are personal choice:
The first one involves doing the contrast adjustments in Photoshop and the other is to open Lightroom and import the tiff file from it’s current location and do the final processing. Both methods can produce favorable results…....just different, it’s a taste thing, but either way is worth playing with.

As always, when processing my work, if I think I have taken it too far then I probably have….....time to back it off a bit. HDR can look ugly really quickly.

Quite a few RB members have Bubble mailed me asking for a run-down on some of my workflow, so I thought I’d put this short explanation together so others may also benefit (or not) from it.

Pete