image post processing

[WDWFigment]

I agree with Code and VVFF's statements for the most part. I hate to see moving objects in my HDR, so I always mask an image on top and brush through afterwards.

One other tip, and one thing that I think commonly happens with HDR images that aren't tone mapped (I'm not wild about tone mapping, myself) is that they look 'flat'. I always increase the contrast by a healthy dose to remedy this.

 

[VVFF]

I was wondering.... What is the difference between bracketing exposures for HDR and the active d lighting on my Nikon D60?

I'm new to all the digital tech advances since the days of my Minolta XG7. I am now spending a great deal of time studying my camera manual and all the wonderful tips and info that you all are so kind to provide.

I have quite a bit of reading and understanding before I figure out how to set the camera up to bracket exposures for HDR but with this Active d lighting thing I was wondering if I needed to go through all of that....
As an example, I Love Figments "Shop at Sid's" black pick up truck shot, and that's sort of the color range that I am after when I come across possible shots that would be good for that sort of thing.

Also, another question...I figure that I will be shooting Raw but there is also a setting for Raw + Jpeg. I have Photoshop CS4 so post production won't be a problem (I think!... LOL, still learning that one too..) Do you think it would be worth it to burn the space on the memory card and do both Raw and Jpeg or just stick with Raw? Advantages, disadvantages anyone??

Smoochies and I love you all to bits for inspiring me to go for it with my equipment!

Marlton Mom

Since no one has directly answered your question I hope I can help. HDR and D-lighting are two entirely different things as you probably have guessed.

HDR can be used mainly for two things, either extending the dynamic range of the camera, or to reduce noise in shadow areas. Most people use it for the former purpose. See, a camera has a certain dynamic range that is inherent to its sensor. You can't go beyond this. You can push it to its max but then photos tend to lack contrast. HDR is a method to solve this until a revolution in dynamic range is achieved.

D-lighting or other brands similar techniques use a slight underexposure and adjust the tone curve to allow highlight details to be maintained while bumping up the shadows. This reduces contrast and will avoid clipping of highlights in some situations. However, it is really limited to a stop or so of "help". This also increases noise as a shorter exposure brightened up will always have more noise than a correct exposure. Also note that if you shoot RAW you D-lighting is not instantly applied to the RAW file. It's a technique of capturing the image and not some special hardware operation or anything.

It's really mainly for JPG users. Otherwise you might as well just fix it yourself afterward in a RAW file. A RAW file will give you more headroom than D-lighting fixes anyway.

HDR captures multiple images that are spaced typically at most +/-2 EC away from "ideal". This captures up to two stops more shadow detail than normal and two stops more highlight detail than normal. The problem is that this can't all be displayed on a computer monitor and must be scaled to increase contrast. So with HDR you "crush" the areas where there is no significant brightness content and use the dynamic range for areas where there are. HDR is easy to overdo and can easily look very fake. It can be very frustrating to nail down but it is rewarding in some cases.

There are also images where HDR is completely unnecessary. If I am taking a picture of the castle at sunset...chances are you don't need HDR. The contrast from the sky to the castle is much lower at this time of day and one exposure can typically capture all that your eye sees. So don't think every image will benefit from HDR or that being HDR automatically makes the image better.

 

[disneyboy2003]

Also, another question...I figure that I will be shooting Raw but there is also a setting for Raw + Jpeg. I have Photoshop CS4 so post production won't be a problem (I think!... LOL, still learning that one too..) Do you think it would be worth it to burn the space on the memory card and do both Raw and Jpeg or just stick with Raw? Advantages, disadvantages anyone??

I can't help you with your HDR question, but it looks like you've already got a lot of expert opinions on that.

Regarding RAW vs RAW+Jpeg, there are a couple reasons to shoot RAW + Jpeg. If your client want to see your photos right after you've taken them (ie. wants a CD of your photos right away), then you can do that right away with your Jpegs and then spend time later on at home or in the office working on the RAW images.

For example, if you're a wedding photographer and you want to impress the crowd by showing a slideshow of the day's photos during the reception, you can do that with your Jpegs. Then later in the week, you can spend time working on the RAW images to refine them for printing, for the wedding photo book, etc.

The other reason to shoot RAW + Jpeg is if you've got THE latest camera, but your software program doesn't yet support your camera's RAW files. For example, if I bought the Canon 7D or the newly-announced Canon 1D Mark IV (don't tell my wife ), I won't be able to use Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw to process any of those RAW files. However, I could process the JPEG files for now until Adobe releases the next incremental upgrade. (or I'd have to use Canon's own software to process those RAW files)

Other than that, I'd just shoot RAW.

 

[Marlton Mom]

Thanks for all the Great info. This will certainly give me good reference points as I experiment and learn.

Smoochies
Marlton Mom

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I just had an amusing opportunity to use my Photoshop skills to do something practical. A neighbor lost her four page math homework. My son is in the same class, but he already finished his. There solution was going to be to copy his and white out all of his work. Instead, I scanned the homework into Photoshop and used the curves control to make all the light gray white and all of the dark gray black. The net effect was to make his pencil marks invisible but the original assignment looked almost perfect.

Now, for a few minutes, my kids think I'm cool.

 

[JoeDif]

Smart thinking!!!

I hope the neighbor doesn't figure out a way to reverse engineer you pp

 

[ukcatfan]

Now, for a few minutes, my kids think I'm cool.

Your kids might think you are cool, but the neighbor girl is probably plotting against you right now. After all, you are responsible for her getting to do four pages of homework on a Sunday afternoon!

 

[fitzperry]

Sneaky . . . but 4 pages of math on a weekend for an elementary school kid (if I remember correctly, your kids are pretty young)? I'm finding that grade school is much more rigorous today than it was when I was there 20 . . . ok, 30 years ago. And there's much more work for parents than I ever remember bringing home for mine--sign this, log that . . . .

 

[Steve's Girl]

Now, for a few minutes, my kids think I'm cool.

Don't worry - this too shall pass...quickly!

My oldest DD (a whopping 8 yrs. old) told me this week that she no longer wants me to come to visiting week in her dance classes. When I asked why not, she told me that only the little kids' parents come to visiting week.

 

[manning]

Sneaky . . . but 4 pages of math on a weekend for an elementary school kid (if I remember correctly, your kids are pretty young)? I'm finding that grade school is much more rigorous today than it was when I was there 20 . . . ok, 30 years ago. And there's much more work for parents than I ever remember bringing home for mine--sign this, log that . . . .

That's too mucn for a weekend. There is no reason to not get it done at school. A few years back there was something on tv and talking to a teacher his policy was no homework on weekends and holidays. He was able to teach everything he had to for the school year and the kids got good grades. He believed weekends and holidays were for the family.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I got even crazier last night. My son wanted help finding words that could made from the letters in Cheeseburger. I showed him how to download a complete list of English words and then filter it to only the words matching his criteria. He ended up with a lot of words.

 

[Gdad]

You are so smart- I would have said "'Cheese' and 'Burger' - Duh!"

 

[ColleenG]

What exactly is it? I've seen pictures where you guys have done this and they look amazing, but I don't quite get what you do. Thanks for explaining!

 

[disneyboy2003]

HDR stands for "high-dynamic range" photography.

When you take a regular picture with your camera, you'll sometimes notice that the bright areas (like the sky) are way too bright, and sometimes the shadow areas are way too dark. Yet, when you look at the scene yourself (without the camera), you can see everything okay (ie. the skies look good, the shadows have details, etc).

That's because your camera can only capture a limited "dynamic range". The difference between the bright areas and dark areas is about 5 stops of exposure. On the other hand, our eyes have a dynamic range of about 10-14 f-stops for any 1 particular scene.

HDR attempts to capture the details in the brightest bright areas and the darkest dark areas. What you do is take 3 pictures in succession: 1 at the normal exposure, another picture that's 2 stops darker (underexposed), and another picture that's 2 stops brighter (overexposed). You can also take more pictures with more exposures, but the minimum is usually 3 photos. And it's usually best to use a tripod so that all 3 pictures look exactly the same. (There's more detail to this technique, but you can learn more about it later...)

You then bring the 3 pictures into a software program. The most popular is HDRSoft's PhotoMatix. You can also do this using Photoshop, although PhotoMatix is commonly considered better than Photoshop for HDR.

The program takes the best parts of each image, and combines them into a brand new image.

Here's an example from the PhotoMatix Web site:

you take these 3 photos above, and combine them into the photo below:

So the result above shows that the bright sky is no longer "blown out" and you can see the details of the sky. In addition, the flowers in the shadow areas are brighter.

There's also a way to use 1 properly exposed photo and do HDR using that single image, but I'll let someone else explain. Sorry for the long post.

 

[boBQuincy]

Yeah, what DisneyBoy said!

As for the mechanics of HDR, most (all?) SLRs and some P&S have a function to automagically bracket the exposure. The camera can be set to take three (or more) exposures in a row, with the difference in the exposures set by a menu pick. In Canon-speak it is called AEB.

Our entry-level and prosumer Canon SLRs only allow three exposures so we set the AEB to +/- 2 stops. By adding exposure compensation we can extend this to 5 exposures at -4, -2, 0, +2, +4 (with a spare 0 exposure that is not needed). By this point you can see we have captured quite a range of light, the original 11 stops of the sensor (Canon Xsi per DxoMark) *plus* 8 more through exposure adjustments. This is usually enough to capture the full range of a scene.

This much range can't be displayed on any monitor (that we can afford) so the software must combine and compress the images into something that fits the range of a monitor. This usually means darkening the bright areas and lightening the dark areas (greatly oversimplified). The result is a full range image that usually looks really good!

While taking the three exposures we usually keep the aperture constant to avoid having three different depths of field in the images. Another technique involves changing the focus for the three images, to extend depth of field from close-up to infinity.
And we can combine HDR *and* DOF techniques to really fill a memory card quickly!
These techniques, and others like Topaz are fulfilling the promise of digital, where we are doing things that film could never do!

 

[MarkBarbieri]

DB and Bob have given great explanations of what I'd call "traditional HDR". That is, HDR done to try to present a scene with a wide dynamic range and make it look resonably natural.

There is a variation of HDR that has also become popular. In fact, when you mention HDR, it's what a lot of people think of. It invovles taking a picture with a relatively wide dynamic range and using HDR tools to process it to get a different look. I can't really describe the look, but you'll see it if you look at many HDR photos. I'm not a particularly big fan of the look, but it is certainly popular.

 

[REL1203]

I have just started to dabble in HDR since I got my 7D... I use Photomatix, and it works WELL. Its got tons of options i am learning, really, its complex, but playing around with everything generally is fun to see what it changes.

Only to shots I have to show you are:
I was doing this handheld, just messing around. Its not good, but gave me ideas what did what.

This one I like, but still nothing special, just looked cool, and came out really sharp.

 

[VVFF]

I have just started to dabble in HDR since I got my 7D... I use Photomatix, and it works WELL. Its got tons of options i am learning, really, its complex, but playing around with everything generally is fun to see what it changes.

Only to shots I have to show you are:
I was doing this handheld, just messing around. Its not good, but gave me ideas what did what.

This one I like, but still nothing special, just looked cool, and came out really sharp.

Personally I am not a fan of pushing HDR to the point where you get Halos around your subjects but this is a good example of how you can use HDR to create a different "look".

 

[REL1203]

Personally I am not a fan of pushing HDR to the point where you get Halos around your subjects but this is a good example of how you can use HDR to create a different "look".

Oh I agree, the first one was just litterally messing with all the sliders... Its not a good example, its just odd looking... The 2nd one, the orange parts are actually the a strange lighting phenomenon that happened at that point at sundown, it was kinda cool, i probalby pushed it to hard, but i dig that pic a little more.. I am the furthest thing from an HDR person, just was messing around with ti to try to learn how to use it when I really want to get some cool pics.

 

[VVFF]

Oh I agree, the first one was just litterally messing with all the sliders... Its not a good example, its just odd looking... The 2nd one, the orange parts are actually the a strange lighting phenomenon that happened at that point at sundown, it was kinda cool, i probalby pushed it to hard, but i dig that pic a little more.. I am the furthest thing from an HDR person, just was messing around with ti to try to learn how to use it when I really want to get some cool pics.

I find HDR on average more frustrating than fun but that's just me