Realistic "HDR" blending in Photoshop

[DSutherland]

I'm curious what other retouchers think of this blending job. It was done with no programs other than photoshop...other than the fact that it is a clipping from a 360 degree pano so all the exposures were stitched in PTGuiPRO.

Image can be found >>HERE<<

[mantra]

Originally Posted by DSutherland

I'm curious what other retouchers think of this blending job. It was done with no programs other than photoshop...other than the fact that it is a clipping from a 360 degree pano so all the exposures were stitched in PTGuiPRO.

Image can be found >>HERE<<

me too!
+1

[CharlesEHilton]

I am pretty new here and not what I call a good retoucher yet but this is a good job. I have only played with PS to do the HDR and have not had results near like this. I would love to hear your process?
Charles

[amica999]

Looks good! Glad you don't like candy colored HDR's :-)

[pixelzombie]

nice, that's what HDR is supposed to look like...

[DSutherland]

thanks for the comments guys, I haven't been able to get my name out there as a retoucher because I have not yet worked for a company that does fashion and products. Hopefully real estate can get me started. If anyone is interested in a tutorial I'm thinking about writing one up....there's no right or wrong way of going about it but I'll try to do my best.

[Jason Dulin]

I think it looks great D. Real estate is a great avenue for HDRi. People are starting to realize that is a great way to accurately represent their products. I also agree with Amica so far as not saturating your HDR images to death. Kudos.

[DSutherland]

Hey Jason, thanks for the feedback. I only wish this style of editing were as lucrative as the other half of retouching because I really love editing RE photography and it would be great to make a business out of it. I was once paid $100/hr for RE retouching but 90% of the time I only charge half that to my clients...the downside is I only do a job around once every 2 months, PHOTOMATIX (to name just 1 out of many) seems to trick allot of RE Photographers into thinking their "HDR" images look great and for some reason it's extremely difficult to get through to them that it isn't. Oversaturation, obscene amounts of blooming, and and "upside-down lighting" seems to be overflowing on Real Estate HDR threads these days.

Does anyone else here almost exclusively do retouching for real-estate/architecture? I'd love to get some advice from someone whose made a business out of it.

[Jason Dulin]

Even if its not a substantial portion of your business it very well could be. HDR is not going anywhere for a while. I think with real estate you are off to a great start by keeping thing believable. I did a test a while back for a realtor and while I was pleased artistically I was told that clients may not think they were actually during a real property, rather an illustration.


There are also lots of people getting work who aren't very good at HDR. I've seen ads in local magazines with burned out cyan skies and glaring halos around buildings. Set yourself up as a specialist and show that you know what you are doing. If you do this I think you will do well.

[DSutherland]

Hey Jason,
Thanks for the advice, I guess I have some work to do setting up a website...I wish I knew as much in Dreamweaver/Flash as I do in Photoshop...it would be a little less painless :P

[ElisaMustika]

Good job. I really like your HDR. So you'd like to have a website for your retouching works but don't have time to learn Dreamweaver/Flash. Why don't you just use SmugMug or Website Tonight (GoDaddy)?

[mantra]

Originally Posted by DSutherland

thanks for the comments guys, I haven't been able to get my name out there as a retoucher because I have not yet worked for a company that does fashion and products. Hopefully real estate can get me started. If anyone is interested in a tutorial I'm thinking about writing one up....there's no right or wrong way of going about it but I'll try to do my best.

wow
thanks
did you write a tutorial?
would love to read it

[DSutherland]

Originally Posted by ElisaMustika

Good job. I really like your HDR. So you'd like to have a website for your retouching works but don't have time to learn Dreamweaver/Flash. Why don't you just use SmugMug or Website Tonight (GoDaddy)?

Thanks Elisa, I didn't know about those site
builders, I'll check them out now. Can you post flash videos in them? I made a flash template where you can just slide your mouse over the image and the before is revealed, would like to include that in my website.

Originally Posted by mantra

wow
thanks
did you write a tutorial?
would love to read it

Sorry Mantra, I haven't written it yet. I've been really busy these days but I'll do my best to have something to show this year...I would like to do a video to show it being done...probably the best way to go about it. Does anyone know of a program that captures your screen and you can lay audio over it?

[mantra]

Originally Posted by DSutherland

Sorry Mantra, I haven't written it yet. I've been really busy these days but I'll do my best to have something to show this year...I would like to do a video to show it being done...probably the best way to go about it. Does anyone know of a program that captures your screen and you can lay audio over it?

you can use http://camstudio.org/ if u are under windows


amazing your gallery , above all your last photos , really great jog|

by the way where did you learn how take and make many exposure blending?
did you use only photoshop for your last shots or other programs?


cheers

[DSutherland]

Originally Posted by mantra

you can use http://camstudio.org/ if u are under windows


amazing your gallery , above all your last photos , really great jog|

by the way where did you learn how take and make many exposure blending?
did you use only photoshop for your last shots or other programs?


cheers

Thanks again I removed most of them from my gallery and moved them into a private link, I'm glad to hear the nice comments on them so I'm more confident in using them to accompany my resume now.
As for how I learned the process...3 years of working for the same company doing the same style of images every day while having strict quality control picking at every small imperfection...there wasn't really any courses involved, just allot of trial and error. We (myself and the other Image Technicians) were responsible for "making it work no matter how we do it within the budgeted amount of time". Almost every month my style would change as I improved my process, it's still changing to this day. Every one of us would process differently but in the end we would all have to come up with a relatively similar look...this doesn't really help for those who are interested in learning. As I said before though, when I get the time I'll do my best to give some processing tips.
Lastly, Photoshop is the only way to go about it. One of mine and few others other tasks was to research almost ever other program out there and see if it could make a nicer product and it was clear that Photoshop is really the #1 tool for this kind of work (no surprise there)....but for stitching, use PTGuiPRO, it rocks.

[mantra]

Originally Posted by DSutherland

Thanks again I removed most of them from my gallery and moved them into a private link, I'm glad to hear the nice comments on them so I'm more confident in using them to accompany my resume now.
As for how I learned the process...3 years of working for the same company doing the same style of images every day while having strict quality control picking at every small imperfection...there wasn't really any courses involved, just allot of trial and error. We (myself and the other Image Technicians) were responsible for "making it work no matter how we do it within the budgeted amount of time". Almost every month my style would change as I improved my process, it's still changing to this day. Every one of us would process differently but in the end we would all have to come up with a relatively similar look...this doesn't really help for those who are interested in learning. As I said before though, when I get the time I'll do my best to give some processing tips.
Lastly, Photoshop is the only way to go about it. One of mine and few others other tasks was to research almost ever other program out there and see if it could make a nicer product and it was clear that Photoshop is really the #1 tool for this kind of work (no surprise there)....but for stitching, use PTGuiPRO, it rocks.

did you use this tutorial ?
i did not understand it to be honest -> http://www.goodlight.us/writing/pain...tinghdr-1.html

thanks
cheers

[DSutherland]

Originally Posted by mantra

did you use this tutorial ?
i did not understand it to be honest -> http://www.goodlight.us/writing/pain...tinghdr-1.html

thanks
cheers

Hi Mantra, great question and the technique he uses is pretty great for ideal conditions like the ones in his examples. I would also use a luminosity mask (but more frequently just the selection) for lamps or simple bright spots that just needed toning down and nothing really special done to it. A window with allot of light coming through and perhaps a plant sitting in front of it would be very hard to accomplish with this technique, but you could use it as a starter to get you to a certain point. I could understand why you had difficulties understanding that tutorial, he could of put almost everything he did into a couple paragraphs without that 4 or 5 page explanation.

I'll try to explain my own version of this technique and I'll try to put it more simply:

If you have something like an outdoor shot or an area where there isn't much mixed lighting and you don't have to worry about dealing with silhouettes, then we can use this.

OK so let's start with your base image,
1. duplicate it so it's your working layer (always keep your base image, you need it for reference so you don't go too overboard, it's easy to lose track of what you've been doing)
2. turn on your next darker spare so it's visible (which should be above your working layer)
3. press CTRL+ALT 2 to select your luminosity from the darker spare
4. press CTRL+D to deselect that selection
5. mask out the darker layer by pressing ALT and clicking on the mask button below your layers
6. press CTRL+SHIFT+D to reselect that selection
7. start painting over the problem area on your mask using white with a big+soft brush to tone down the lighting (your brush should generally be the size of the area you are working with, I normally start from the outside and work my way in if the light is circular, gradually making my brush smaller). My settings are 25 flow and 100 opacity (sometimes 50 opacity depending on how much I need to do) spacing 10...the trick is to NOT drag your brush. make CLICKS, it gives you precise control...when I started I was using something like 100 opacity and 1 flow and dragging, crazy now that I look back on it and one of the people training me was like, "you wouldn't wash a gym floor with a toothbrush would you?"
9. repeat these steps for each darker layer you have.

...I'll add that this doesn't work for every situation but from time to time it would be a perfect solution for those easier lighting conditions.

EXTRA TRICK: try doing the same with your lighter spares but inverting the selection. I use this technique to lighten area's a lot more than I use it to darken areas.

...I may have went overboard on the formatting but I just wanted the key points to stand out

hope this helps,
Darren

[mistermonday]

Darren, I had always been a bit sceptical about Photomatix but recently I began to question the results I was getting with CS5's new Merge to HDR Pro. So I packed some gear and and shot a ton of building architecture in cluding old detailed building like Parliament Hill up in Ottawa Canada. Buildings like that really put HDR to the test.
It was a bright sunny day with high contrast shooting conditions both when the building faces were facing the sun and in the shadows. Almost all of the tests got 7 shots separated by 1 ev, fixed ISO(200), fixed F16, and tripod bound with output 14 bit Nikon RAW.
I decided to compare CS5 against the latest version of Photomatix 4.02. Like you I don't consider the exaggerated saturation, over-sharpened, over detailed, look to be what HDR is all about. So I set both programs up to open the RAWs and do default tone mapping with no adjustments or special effects.
To my surprise, Photomatix beat out PS on every single set of shots. In 100% of the sets PS produced select blown highlights, darker shadows with much less detail brought out, overall darker images, and less detail in the mid tones. The blue in the skies was much more real in Photomatix as PS seemed to overdose on a shift toward Cyan-Green. Most of the time the PS controls could be used to partly compensate but it took a ton of fiddling with all the sliders where as the Photomatix results were almost perfect right out of the gate. There were a couple of images where PS produces a bad posterization effect in the sky and the only way to get rid of it was to deselect a couple of the images in the set of 7. As a spot check, I downloaded the free test image "Carnival" from Photomatix web site. PS produced an image with severe posterization in the center of the sky. Naturally the Photomatix result had none but then I am sure HDRSoft chose an image it new would give PS some trouble.
So far I am reasonably convinced that Photomatix knox the sox off PS for what I would consider the essential task of producing an image of highest dynamic, realistic detail and color, from a set of bracketed photos.
BTW, I also took other scenic set with trees in fall colors and got the same results.
I will try shooting some other types of scenes to compare but I am guessing the results will be pretty much the same.
Regards, Murray

[girlsfather]

Originally Posted by DSutherland

OK so let's start with your base image,
1. duplicate it so it's your working layer (always keep your base image, you need it for reference so you don't go too overboard, it's easy to lose track of what you've been doing)
2. turn on your next darker spare so it's visible (which should be above your working layer)
3. press CTRL+ALT 2 to select your luminosity from the darker spare
4. press CTRL+D to deselect that selection
5. mask out the darker layer by pressing ALT and clicking on the mask button below your layers
6. press CTRL+SHIFT+D to reselect that selection
7. start painting over the problem area on your mask using white with a big+soft brush to tone down the lighting (your brush should generally be the size of the area you are working with, I normally start from the outside and work my way in if the light is circular, gradually making my brush smaller). My settings are 25 flow and 100 opacity (sometimes 50 opacity depending on how much I need to do) spacing 10...the trick is to NOT drag your brush. make CLICKS, it gives you precise control...when I started I was using something like 100 opacity and 1 flow and dragging, crazy now that I look back on it and one of the people training me was like, "you wouldn't wash a gym floor with a toothbrush would you?"
9. repeat these steps for each darker layer you have.

...I'll add that this doesn't work for every situation but from time to time it would be a perfect solution for those easier lighting conditions.

EXTRA TRICK: try doing the same with your lighter spares but inverting the selection. I use this technique to lighten area's a lot more than I use it to darken areas.

...I may have went overboard on the formatting but I just wanted the key points to stand out

hope this helps,
Darren

Hi Darren,

I really like your picture.
But it looks like a fusion of the pictures and not like a tonemapped HDR.
Am I wrong?

Best regards,
Michael

[DSutherland]

Hi Murray,

Could you post examples of what you came up with? I'm curious to see them. I'll also add that I don't use CS5's new merge to HDR feature, I just blend using masks and other techniques...I normally default to the "blend by hand" phrase.

Originally Posted by girlsfather

Hi Darren,

I really like your picture.
But it looks like a fusion of the pictures and not like a tonemapped HDR.
Am I wrong?

Best regards,
Michael

Hi Michael, fusion is certainly a more appropriate word than HDR because realistically my images aren't true HDR (hence the quotation marks around HDR on the title of this thread)...neither is 99.9% of the images on the net tagged as HDR. There's a lot of grey area's with the word "HDR" and these days people seem to recognize HDR as either fused images or tone mapped images (which everyone knows can result in a super OTT look)...personally I try not to get caught up in the terminology and I use HDR simply because more people are familiar with that word than fusion.
It's kind of funny but I recently saw that the company I used to do this kind of work for changed their terminology on their website from "High Dynamic Range Photography" to "High Definition Photography".

[mistermonday]

Originally Posted by DSutherland

Hi Murray,

Could you post examples of what you came up with? I'm curious to see them. I'll also add that I don't use CS5's new merge to HDR feature, I just blend using masks and other techniques...I normally default to the "blend by hand" phrase.

Darren, attached are the 1st two sets of compares between CS5 and Photomatix and the 3rd set will follow in the next post (limit is 5 attachments per post).
The most challenging areas in any merge / fusion are the highlights. Here PS fails miserably. In almost 100% of my tests on several hundred images, CS5 performed very poorly in the highlights. Most of the time they contain blown out areas which are not easily recoverable or in some cases creates some nasty posterization effects as you will see in the 3rd image.
The other thing I find with CS5 is that it does not bring out the shadow detail well. These can be boosted usually with the standard set of tools like exposure, Shadow Highlight, etc.

The image sets are default settings from both programs with no adjustments.
In image 1 see the difference in the white stone, and the gold spikes.
In image 2 see the details in the windows and stone.
In image 3 look at the sky that surrounds the model's head and look at the bird in the sky..

As for termonology, unfortunately HDR has become synonomous with something it was never intended to be. Somewhere along the timeline people distorted the the ability to capture fine detail from deep shadow to high highlight with excessive saturation, contrast inversions, high microcontrast contrast and a touch of surrealism.

I have been benchmarking a number of HDR s/w products. I think Photoshop is way back in the pack right now.

The attachments are screenshots of sections of very large files.

Regards, Murray

[mistermonday]

This is a continuation of the previous post. Attached is the 3rd set of images.
Regards, Murray

[DSutherland]

Hi Murray, thanks for providing the examples. It's interesting to see how the automatic programs/tools have developed (back when I tested Photomatix a year or two ago I highly doubt it would have given the same results just off of the default settings).
It may be a matter of preference but I'm still not convinced that an automated program like Photomatix, Enfuse, Tufuse, CS5's Merge to HDR, or etc is the best tool to create the realistic "HDR" look. Sometimes you might find yourself in a situation like the image attached and ultimately you will need to bring it into Photoshop to fix (unless Photomatix made some changes I didn't hear about over the last 6 months). To add to it (I think I've said this before), if you have a client who asks for a lot of specifics that need to be done to an image, beyond just exposure blending, then I don't see Photomatix working out at all.
For something that's quick, very user friendly, and gives you a pretty decent result for personal use then I agree that Photomatix is great for all of the average hobbyists out there but I still couldn't justify it's results and limitations to use it as a pro tool.

[mistermonday]

Darren, the latest version of Photomatix has come a long way in the past year. I find that setting it up to do a merge and tonemap from32 to 16 bit without adding Inversion Light Smoothing or other adjustments, that the software does an excellent job at capturing the full dynamic range of the bracketed set. It does this almost 100% of the time. The natural controls like luminance allow fine tuning. From here Photomatix opens the image in Photoshop where I can finish any special processing. For the 95% of the time where is does a superb job of merging / fusion, it saves me a ton of time stacking original files and masking parts of all the layers in manually. For the rare time where the program is stumped, I can bring in one of the original RAW files to blend in a problem area.
What's the downside, you might ask? While Photomatix has beaten every other HDR s/w I have tried at merging, it's weakness is supressing the noise (remove noise option unchecked). The Remove Noise option and sliders do work but there is no way to preview it so sometimes I apply too much or too little a level. I need to play with it more.
Regards, Murray

[creativeretouch]

A some time ago I went across this tutorial:
http://backingwinds.blogspot.com/200...dr-images.html

As I have a lot of single shot images without different exposures in my archive I do not use this technique (it does not work well if you try to create new exposures from original one) but I would like to know what you think of it. There is an interesting part where after the command "Merge to HDR" in Photoshop you need to make adjustments during conversion from a 32 bit file to a 16 bit file. It looks like a way to deal (nondestructive) with bright lights and final tones of the image.

[mistermonday]

Originally Posted by creativeretouch

A some time ago I went across this tutorial:
http://backingwinds.blogspot.com/200...dr-images.html

As I have a lot of single shot images without different exposures in my archive I do not use this technique (it does not work well if you try to create new exposures from original one) but I would like to know what you think of it. There is an interesting part where after the command "Merge to HDR" in Photoshop you need to make adjustments during conversion from a 32 bit file to a 16 bit file. It looks like a way to deal (nondestructive) with bright lights and final tones of the image.

That blog posting was from 2006 and the process was the predecessor of what is now called Merge To HDRPro in CS5. Both the merging of the source files and the tone mapping from 32 bit to 16 bit are done in the same module and now there are a whole bunch of sliders to adjust the strength, exposure, gamma, etc.

As far as merging images to HDR, Photoshop has some ways to go to be as good as the leading 3rd party HDR applications and plugins. As indicated above, it seems weak in retaining highlight detail and bring out shadow detail. However, this may be just my experiences.

Regards, Murray

[creativeretouch]

Thanx Murray ...