merge to HDR

[Hobbitling]

I just realized my computer at work has photoshop CS2 on it, and I'm drooling over the cool new features.

One is the "merge to HDR" feature, which allows you to take several exposures of the same scene and combine them into a shot that captures detail from areas that would normally be overexposed or underexposed.

has anyone ever used the "Merge to HDR" feature?

[pico23]

HDR tends to be a bit gimmicky, kind of like an ultrawide lens or fisheye. Really cool just because it looks different at first, but then you realize you still need to start with a good subject, good exposure, and ideal conditions for HDR.

Really what you are doing is tone mapping. You can't actually do anything with the HDR image itself. It looks best with urban night scenes, and other already low contrast scenes since it's basically reducing contrast so much to get all those tones "mapped".

I use photomatix sometimes since CS didn't come with an HDR feature, but honestly, I've created just a few HDR's I like of my own, and only seen about 20 out of hundreds or thousands of other peoples I thought were high quality, and more than a gimmick. There are 2 guys on flickr that do amazing work with it. Part of the reason I started to mess around with it but they are reasonably careful to pick his scenes. But even they occassionally fall victim to "look it's HDR".

Actually just for representation of the garish nature of HDR here are two I did early on before I bought the pro version of photomatix.

I like neither of these two, but the capitol from the state ed building was actually an attempt at salvaging the image that I accidentially shot in JPEG (with the wrong white balance ). The D&H building was an attempt to make the most out of poor afternoon light. My wife loves it, I hate it. Looks totally fake. Glad she thought it was a good use of 45 minutes in downtown albany messing with the shift lens and tripod while waiting for breaks in the cars. Reminds me of a scene from Schrek The Third





This one however is a favorite. It's HDR from a single RAW file which really isn't HDR. Again, a low contrast scene that worked well. Stitching 5 dynamic images together in one pass was hard, but I'm doubtful I could have bracketed all 5 by 5 stops to create a true HDR image.



And one of the few I actually like (and of the Adirondacks)...of course it was created using jpegs from a Kodak 7440. So again, not truly HDR as 8bit jpegs have a very limited tonal range, even with the 1 stop brackets. supposedly from the experts you ideally need 5-10 stops of 16bit TIFF. So you'd need to take 5-10 1 stop RAW images of the same scene to really milk the most from HDR.




I attached what a non tone mapped image looks like from a screen shot.

[Hobbitling]

yeah, probably no replacement for a good ND-grad filter. its the same trap people fall into with the "shadow highlights" feature. they over use it and get dull images with no contrast, or images with way too much noise.

[pico23]

yeah, probably no replacement for a good ND-grad filter. its the same trap people fall into with the "shadow highlights" feature. they over use it and get dull images with no contrast, or images with way too much noise.

Nailed it...it's a great tool for limited use, but people fall in love with it.

Don't get me started on the shadow highlights. If you need more than a tonal width of about 30 and a 10% adjustment the photo is dead.

I find it funny photoshop starts with default shadow settings of 50% and 50 tonal width.

I honestly don't know how the CS2 merge to HDR works, but if it's similar to photomatix then it's definitely not a replacement for an ND filter. If there is a merge "shadow/highlights" option in CS2 than that is what you want to use.

However, you can "merge" or combine two bracketed exposures in place of a split ND filter in the field with better control. I regularly do this and actually, I just took the split ND out of my bag for the last time. It was a pain to setup, required that big Cokin filter, and rings for each lens. Unless shooting slides it's done, and even with slides, assuming I'm scanning first, I'm better off bracketing 2 exposures (2-3 stops difference) and combining them later.

I've been talking about this a lot, if I have some time later I will post a step by step how to on it. Although there are at least 3 ways of doing it all give a similar result. I don't even think you need the full photoshop, Elements will work fine for any of the techniques.