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Holdenhsvgtsr Asked me how to do some HDR shots on a Point and Shoot so I wrote a little tutorial, and seeing as I tend to go a little overboard when explaining photography, heres my full post for everyone else.
And yes while HDR is a bit overused today, its still (and heres a quote from another anonymous photography site, roughly) No different then Ansel Adams messing around in a darkroom to create art.
(Sorry Mods, if the images are too wide, photobucket doesn't seam to have a thumbnail link I could find)
If you are using a point and shoot (bridge) camera, as long as you have some way to control the shutter speed or ability to adjust the exposure thats all you really need.
So say if you had a camera with only full manual, the first thing you need to do is set it to Manual mode, most cameras this looks like this
This mode is the best way to shoot hdr shots since you have complete control over the camera's shutter speed and aperture (a big thing when shooting different exposures).
Now when you switch the camera to this mode generally the camera's display will have a readout sort of like this (this is a quick mock up I just did in Photoshop, and yes thats my dog, and the canon body I shamelessly jacked from a quick Google search, nothing against dpreview though)
Your camera will no doubt differ from this shoot.
On the screen there are three very important things to look at. Starting left to right we have the Aperture value at 5.6. Now If you are ever doing different exposure shots (Also known as Bracketing), you want the aperture to stay the same, if you use Program auto and change values from there, the aperture will no doubt change, which in the end wont allow you to properly align your images without some sort of distortion. But since we are in full manual set it to something in the 2.8-5.6 range. Now as you change the aperture you will notice the Ev (exposure value) scale (?) change, for now we want it to stay in the center at exactly Ev0.00 (or zero if you want simplicity), so if the scale shows +2 we will want to slow our shutter speed down until our Ev is zero.
Now once we have all our scene correctly exposed, which in the case of my dogs picture this is the settings I pulled off of the jpeg exif data, we will want to take our shutter speed down until we are at Ev-1.00
Take the picture.
Now bump our shutter speed up till we hit Ev0.00
Take It.
Now we pull our shutter speed up till we hit Ev1.00
Although three photos are more than enough for basic HDR, I tend to take 5 to 7, (-2,-1,0,1,2/-3,-2,-1,0,1,2,3) For what I shoot, but I find you have to work with the images alot more with more exposures. You could also repeat the last three steps and use Ev-2,0,+2 for a bit more depth (I guess is the correct term)
Anyways with these three photos you now have 3 ways to process them.
Photoshop: This route requires the most monetary wise, so unless you have the money, which if you do you most likely know all of this already, or you are a pirate, and don't know how to use Photoshop.
Qtpfsgui: Open source solution, and has superb tone mapping, uhh filters(?)/algorithms. takes a few tries to get a nice HDR photo processed and make it look good, but its worth it.
Photomatix: I've never really used it so I'm not going to give and false review about it, but others give it really good reviews. Comes as standalone program, or tone mapping plug-in for Photoshop CS2/3
Now, while I use a combination of both Photoshop CS3, and Qtpfsgui, I'll give you a basic rundown with just Qtpfsgui.
So once you fire up Qtpfsgui hit the new HDR button, hit load images, and find your images. Here Qtpfsgui will determine the (true) Ev of the images and give you the option to have the images aligned. Now in this screen shot since I faked the exposures from one image in Photoshop, and corrected them here as an example. I myself routinely will load images up and Qtpfsgui will show [-3.68, -2.4, -1.2, .6, 1], even though I shot from -2 to +2 in the camera, This will happen and you shouldn't worry about it.
If you handhold the camera while you were shooting the images, select auto align.
Next step Qt will give you is to go around and manually align images if you want, but 93% of the time it does a good job by it self.
The next step explains it self.
Listen to this Screen! It knows it stuff. Don't dick with anything here, I've always used the defaults here and have never had a problem, You shouldn't and probably won't.
Now I hope you like the look of mud, since thats what you image will no doubtfully look like at first. the reason is mostly due to the fact that no matter how much you paid for your monitor or what bit depth you display is set to, your physical screen can only display in an 8Bit depth (correct me for a better term, or tell me if I'm wrong here). Whereas HDR is a 32Bit image, so the end result is mud mostly.
"But how do all the HDR shots I see look awesome and not mud?" You will ask me (no really ask me).
Tone mapping is the answer (thanks for not asking, jerk).
So hit the Tone map HDR button.
Once were at the tone mapping stage its all experimentation, since one setting is not good for all photos, render size plays a huge role in the image's also, as seen in this shot. However I have found that the Fattal "operator" Is best for that over processed HDR look, and the Reinhard '05, is best for clean HDR Tone maps.
And yes while HDR is a bit overused today, its still (and heres a quote from another anonymous photography site, roughly) No different then Ansel Adams messing around in a darkroom to create art.
(Sorry Mods, if the images are too wide, photobucket doesn't seam to have a thumbnail link I could find)
Holdenhsvgtsr
If you are using a point and shoot (bridge) camera, as long as you have some way to control the shutter speed or ability to adjust the exposure thats all you really need.
So say if you had a camera with only full manual, the first thing you need to do is set it to Manual mode, most cameras this looks like this
This mode is the best way to shoot hdr shots since you have complete control over the camera's shutter speed and aperture (a big thing when shooting different exposures).
Now when you switch the camera to this mode generally the camera's display will have a readout sort of like this (this is a quick mock up I just did in Photoshop, and yes thats my dog, and the canon body I shamelessly jacked from a quick Google search, nothing against dpreview though)
Your camera will no doubt differ from this shoot.
On the screen there are three very important things to look at. Starting left to right we have the Aperture value at 5.6. Now If you are ever doing different exposure shots (Also known as Bracketing), you want the aperture to stay the same, if you use Program auto and change values from there, the aperture will no doubt change, which in the end wont allow you to properly align your images without some sort of distortion. But since we are in full manual set it to something in the 2.8-5.6 range. Now as you change the aperture you will notice the Ev (exposure value) scale (?) change, for now we want it to stay in the center at exactly Ev0.00 (or zero if you want simplicity), so if the scale shows +2 we will want to slow our shutter speed down until our Ev is zero.
Now once we have all our scene correctly exposed, which in the case of my dogs picture this is the settings I pulled off of the jpeg exif data, we will want to take our shutter speed down until we are at Ev-1.00
Take the picture.
Now bump our shutter speed up till we hit Ev0.00
Take It.
Now we pull our shutter speed up till we hit Ev1.00
Although three photos are more than enough for basic HDR, I tend to take 5 to 7, (-2,-1,0,1,2/-3,-2,-1,0,1,2,3) For what I shoot, but I find you have to work with the images alot more with more exposures. You could also repeat the last three steps and use Ev-2,0,+2 for a bit more depth (I guess is the correct term)
Anyways with these three photos you now have 3 ways to process them.
Photoshop: This route requires the most monetary wise, so unless you have the money, which if you do you most likely know all of this already, or you are a pirate, and don't know how to use Photoshop.
Qtpfsgui: Open source solution, and has superb tone mapping, uhh filters(?)/algorithms. takes a few tries to get a nice HDR photo processed and make it look good, but its worth it.
Photomatix: I've never really used it so I'm not going to give and false review about it, but others give it really good reviews. Comes as standalone program, or tone mapping plug-in for Photoshop CS2/3
Now, while I use a combination of both Photoshop CS3, and Qtpfsgui, I'll give you a basic rundown with just Qtpfsgui.
So once you fire up Qtpfsgui hit the new HDR button, hit load images, and find your images. Here Qtpfsgui will determine the (true) Ev of the images and give you the option to have the images aligned. Now in this screen shot since I faked the exposures from one image in Photoshop, and corrected them here as an example. I myself routinely will load images up and Qtpfsgui will show [-3.68, -2.4, -1.2, .6, 1], even though I shot from -2 to +2 in the camera, This will happen and you shouldn't worry about it.
If you handhold the camera while you were shooting the images, select auto align.
Next step Qt will give you is to go around and manually align images if you want, but 93% of the time it does a good job by it self.
The next step explains it self.
Listen to this Screen! It knows it stuff. Don't dick with anything here, I've always used the defaults here and have never had a problem, You shouldn't and probably won't.
Now I hope you like the look of mud, since thats what you image will no doubtfully look like at first. the reason is mostly due to the fact that no matter how much you paid for your monitor or what bit depth you display is set to, your physical screen can only display in an 8Bit depth (correct me for a better term, or tell me if I'm wrong here). Whereas HDR is a 32Bit image, so the end result is mud mostly.
"But how do all the HDR shots I see look awesome and not mud?" You will ask me (no really ask me).
Tone mapping is the answer (thanks for not asking, jerk).
So hit the Tone map HDR button.
Once were at the tone mapping stage its all experimentation, since one setting is not good for all photos, render size plays a huge role in the image's also, as seen in this shot. However I have found that the Fattal "operator" Is best for that over processed HDR look, and the Reinhard '05, is best for clean HDR Tone maps.
