Burning Crow Pictures

A lot of people have been asking me about the process involved with my HDR images so I thought I would post some BEFORE/AFTER shots along with a little explanation.

First thing to know about HDR is that it is High Dynamic Range images. It is an image that has greater dynamic range of luminances in the highlights and dark tones. Basically it means you are able to see detail into the shadows and the highlights at the same time. HDR can be done by 3D computer rendering or a series of photographs. You can only get true HDR through multiple photographs because there isn’t a camera that has the ability to get multiple exposures on the same picture.

Tone mapping is a technique used to reduce contrast so you can view HDR images on a device with lower dynamic range. It can also be applied to images to create an artistic effect which is what I do.

The actual process of taking an HDR photograph is done in camera. A lot of cameras have the ability to take a series of photos at different exposures. The Panasonic GH1 has Auto Bracket that each picture up to 7 at a time with different exposure settings. An example of what that looks like is below.

It is good to keep the camera as still as possible because all of these pictures are going to have to be merged together later and if there is too much movement then you get a ghosting effect. The ghosting effect can actually make some interesting pictures but if it isn’t what you want then a tripod really is needed for these pictures.

The more you take these sort of pictures the more you are able to pre-visualize what something might look like. In this instance Bow showed up wearing his leather jacket, cool gloves, and interesting helmet. When I saw this I thought it almost had a futuristic quality to it so had in my mind one of the photographs I wanted to shoot. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get a shot of him actually riding his bike down the road because you can’t do an HDR like that but I knew I could make it appear he was doing so. I wanted to give that sort of futuristic feel to it and I knew the leather jacket would look good just by how the light bounced off of it. I think it turned out almost as I imagined it before I even took the shot.

I have found that HDR images really shine with images that have a broad range of contrast. For instance anything with a lot of sky in the background will give you detail in the sky and on the subject which isn’t usually possible in non-HDR photographs. I personally like objects that have a shiny surface or a highly textured surface like rust. You can really bring out these qualities with these images because there is a lot of detail in the HDR images.

So here I have picked the fourth picture in the Auto Bracket series just to show what one of the pictures looks like straight out of the camera. Nothing much to it and it is kind of boring. The others have either highlights blown out or blacks crushed.

Next is all of these pictures merged using photoshop into an HDR image. A key thing here is to save your merged HDR into a radiance file after it has completed processing. The radiance file will create a .hdr file. It was then tone mapped with very little done to it at this point. I use Photomatix for tone mapping the images. During this process you can start to see what it is all about. There are intensity levels in tone mapping. I usually push them all the way up and then start to pull them back down until I find a good spot for the picture. You can notice detail in the shadows while maintaining detail in the highlights. The leather jacket now shows a shiny surface in the shadows for instance which is what I was hoping for.

Now the artistic part begins besides the actual photograph itself. Once the TIFF is saved from Photomatix you open it back up in Photoshop. There is a lot of tweaks to do in order to get a certain style out of the tone mapped images. I like to make images with a darker feel to them. Crushing the blacks and bringing up the highlights. I usually will lighten highlights by hand using an overlay layer and even burning some shadows. Every picture behaves differently and every one has their own settings. You can do presets but the quality of the image can vary so much with HDR. You really are not sure what you are going to get sometimes because we are unable to really see such dynamic range with our own eyes. You can only imagine and in this case it came very close to what I hoped.

You could easily stop here because it is an interesting picture. However it isn’t the look I had in my head so I did many steps to get there. It finally came out the way I wanted. All together there were almost 20 steps involved to get it where I wanted. It’s not something you can really explain to somebody in a casual conversation. It is almost like me trying to explain my ideas on my next film through words but knowing I would really need to make storyboards to show it.