How to create 32 bit HDR files in Lightroom 4

Here is another Photographer's Lounge video by Tom Baker.

Today Tom shows how to create 32 Bit HDR files for editing in Lightroom 4.x WITHOUT needing Adobe CS5 or 6. A great way to make realistic HDR images easily.

its day six of our twelve days of christmas gifts for photographers

Have you ever photographed a high contrast scene? If so, you know that even the best exposure gives you blown out highlights, or flat shadows, or both. The solution is High Dynamic Range (HDR) processing:

› Take multiple photographs at varying exposure levels (brackets) › Merge the photos into an HDR image › Adjust the settings to get the look you want: from natural-looking with Exposure Fusion to painterly or surreal with Tone Mapping

See examples of HDR photos

Learn HDR techniques with video tutorials

Try HDR processing with a free trial of Photomatix

Photomatix Pro and Photomatix Essentials are stand-alone programs running on Windows and Mac OS X.

One license for Photomatix Essentials is US$39. One license for Photomatix Pro is US$99.

Photomatix Essentials focuses on simplicity and ease of use. Photomatix Pro offers more options and includes advanced features such as batch processing and selective deghosting, as well as a Lightroom Plug-in.

Some of the features of Photomatix are also available as an Edit Plug-in for Aperture and a Filter Plug-in for Photoshop CS2 or higher. A free Lightroom Plug-in makes it possible to access Photomatix Pro directly from Lightroom, if desired. Tell your family and friends that if they want to purchase the software they can receive 15% off of the Photomatix plug-in if they go to http://www.hdrsoft.com/ and enter KPepPhoto on checkout to receive the discount.

is HDR artistic impression or another editing tool to create a proper exposed image?

There has been a lot of chatter lately about HDR... is it art, does it diminish the photographic talent of the photographer... is it too fake looking, why do it... and ON, and ON, and ON.....

For me, its just another way to express your artistic expression... if you do not agree, well, you are entitled to your opinion and you are more than welcome to comment below.

After talking to a lot of people, I believe what they do not like is the surreal looking grunge photos that almost mimic an Andy Warhol painting, but much MUCH more expressive...

Look at the photo above for instance... its a 5 image HDR edited in photomatix and CS5. It does not look too surreal, its not grungy. In fact it gives the image a complete tonal range and allowed me to get proper exposure throughout when I did not have a flash or reflector.

This was 5 images at f16 and 100ISO at 1second, 1/2 second, 1/4second, 1/8 second, 1/16th of a second exposures.

I created the HDR in photomatix, saved as a TIFF and then opened that image up in the RAW editor of CS5

Some non evasive dodging and burning, some minor color correction and a few further exposure tweaks and I had the base image.

I then took this image and overlayed the middle image of the original 5 and did some layering to bring back a bit of the original image.

When done I ran a 1.5 pixel high pass filter over th eimage to bring out some of the details on the truck and voila... a pretty decent looking image at 11:30am when the sun was high in the sky and washing out the scenes at the auto wreckers.

But hey don't jsut listen to me, join Rick Sammon and Tom Baker as they discuss HDR and lighting techniques on September 22, 23 in Kitchener, Ontario. See the details of the event here...  http://www.photographers-lounge.com/seminars/rick-sammon/

If you have an opinion on HDR I would love it if you shared in the comments below.