January 11th, 2015

Today I tried HDR- High Dynamic Range.  I have been wondering about it for a while and I had the time to try it out. I skimmed through a blog post and found out that I needed to take bracketed images, exposing for the highlights, midtones, and shadows.

I went to take some photos. Jen and I went to a new park today Oaks Bottom Wildlife refuge.

This take a lot of effort in post processing.  If you do it like Jacob Shultz does or this great video by Overnight Photographer showed me.

I also downloaded the trial version of Photomatrix Pro to see what it was all about too. It was recommended by the Wojciech Toman (the author of the first blog post I mentioned.) Since the software is a trial version the watermark from Photomatrix appears on the images I made with it.

Here are the results of my experiment:

(I would like to say that, maybe I didn't pick the best images to try this with...)

First my image from Lightroom:

The shadows have been lighted and the leaf brightened.

My attempt at merging and masking my three images together in Photoshop, with some minor tweeks in Lightroom:

This image that Photomatrix Pro created:

I can see the usefulness if this technique, It isn't for me though. There is far to much work at home in front of the computer. If I were to  need to do this I would pony up the $99 for the software and be done.

Here are some other examples I made, not using Photoshop, just Lightroom and the Photomatrix Pro software.

I also took these today:

Just a tiny bit of tweaking in Lightroom, just the way I like it!

Hope you had a great day!!