So everyone now knows about HDR.  Well ok, most “creatives” do anyway. High Dynamic Range imagery is made from a set of photographs taken with a wide range of exposures. The idea is to shoot enough images to get the widest range of intensity levels in the lights and the shadows.  There are a few HDR programs (Photomatix seems the most popular) you can get to help blend, or tone map, these images into one brilliant, almost 3D quality image which depending on your taste/style could look as realistic or surreal and illustrative as you want.

But… What if you don’t have one of these programs, or a camera that you can’t set to bracket, or an unsteady hand and no tripod? As long as you can shoot in RAW and have Photoshop, this little tutorial I found, and will work through here for you, might come in very handy. You can also save it as a preset so you don’t have to keep creating it over and over.

1. Open your RAW image in Photoshop so the camera raw dialog box comes up.

2. Crank up recovery and fill light to 100, leave blacks alone for now. Also crank up contrast, clarity, and vibrance to 100.

As you can see, over compensating of the settings makes the image look way too intense. So, next…

3. You’ll want to take the saturation down about -65% to -75%.  Here you can start to get a semi-saturated look to the image, but the colors that were strong still remain that way.  If you look at the details you can see that now they have an illustrative quality to them.

4. Next, add back some black to the photo to add contrast, and tweek your saturation to how you like it visually.

**In a nutshell, now your done!! Not that hard is it?!

5. You can then go back in and tweek your images. For instance, sometimes HDRs create halos.  To reduce this you can go back in and change the clarity.  Remember this technique is very artistic, so play with the settings and have fun!! If you like what you did and want to save your presets, continue to next step, or scroll to the bottom to see the final results from a “fake HDR” vs. a real one.

6. To save your presets click on the presets icon, (the last button in your tool box), and select the drop down menu to “save presets” and a dialog box should show up. In the dialog box, just select the changes that you made. (In CS4 you can rename it at the top of that box; in CS3 you will have to hit save and a box will show up where you rename it and tell it where to save (usually into your settings folder)).

6. The saved settings will now show up in your presets dialog box so you can open any new RAW image, click on that saved preset and it will apply all the same settings to your new image.

**Below I have posted the RAW fake “HDR” and the Photomatix HDR taken from 5 shots each a half an fstop apart. You can see how each looks.**

The Original:

The “Fake HDR”:

The Real HDR:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.