The rest of HDR (as far as I?m concerned)

The rest of HDR (as far as I’m concerned)

So I went out for a walk to the local road bridge over the canal: standing at one end, looking down the flight of locks towards Birmingham provided a classic ‘suitable for HDR’ view. As I stood there, looking round the scene, I could see the brickwork of the abutment clearly on my left: looking straight down the canal, I could see clouds in the sky.

And there’s the problem: human eyes adapt to the part of the scene that you’re looking at, and cameras don’t. A full-on HDR image allows the viewer to see detail in both deep shade and bright highlights, without being an obvious distortion of reality. As the eye moves round the frame, it sees what it is expecting to see, from long experience of the world.

I rested the camera and lens against the right-hand abutment, and locked focus, and shot a series of images adjusting shutter speed in manual mode. This ensured that I didn’t get unfortunate ghosting of sharp and blurry versions of specific parts of the frame. And I headed home to the luxury of a desktop computer with a fairly powerful CPU – handling several 36mp files is not for the faint of processing.



I loaded my half-dozen plus frames into Photomatix software, and let it do its stuff: it then offered me a number of different options for preset styles. My (fairly limited) experience of this package is that it’s worth looking at couple of options, and – just like taking a glamour model out into a public space – the secret is not to frighten the horses. Choose one of the options that makes it look as though you haven’t shot loads of frames, and has no strange colour casts.

Now, thanks to helpful info about Nik HDR Efex that mistere and Chase gave me on Saturday, I’ve also tried loading the files into the Nik plugin within Photoshop. Definitely slower, and with my lack of experience of using Nik in this way, I’m sure the result isn’t the optimum. It is a massive TIFF file, though, and saving as a JPG was, for some reason, not possible. So I tried saving as a PSD file: smaller, but still massive. Eventually, I found that I’d got a 32-bit file, and changing that to 16-bit allowed me to save a JPG. I wish I understood all of that, by the way.



Clearly exhibiting masochistic tendencies, I then tried the built-in HDR merge that PS 2021 offers. Again, rather slower than Photomatix: I wonder if something I did along the way has clogged up a buffer or something? Once the files were merged, there were a number of options – I’ll just comment that the defaults left a bit to be desired, and the option described as ‘photorealistic’ was weird. Very, very weird.

At the end of this, I actually have more questions than answers – though the two or three answers I have matter to me, and may matter to you.



First, Photomatix gave me a better result, more easily. This may not remain true for smaller files, or fewer files, or if you persist with the other two methods until you actually know what you’re doing.
Second, you really, really need to go beyond the first preset that any package offers. Definitions of ‘realistic’ vary as much in HDR as in politics.

And third, I think I got a result from the processing that looks the way that I perceived the scene. Not clever and artful: just how I saw it.