Post by Ben on Nov 9, 2009 10:36:57 GMT -6
As the title says, I've started playing with HDR images (the blending of multiple images to enhance tonal range and/or DOF, etc.). And, actually, this is my first one. As most of you know, balancing a dark watch face with the rest of the watch and/or backgrounds can be a bit frustrating. This one is 3 shots taken at the "correct" exposure, then one 2 stops over-exposed and 2 stops under-exposed. But you can use one image and then make three copies of it with different exposures - it depends on the image.
This first image is the unretouched single "correct" exposure (f/32 @ 1 second):
The second image is the unretouched fusion of the 3 images:
The fused image really shows what you can do with the HDR process. With some minor tweaking this would be a perfectly acceptable image, but gives a great jumping off point to do pretty much anything you can think of doing with your photographs.
And this image is what I ended up doing with it:
I've a long way to go in experimenting, but this isn't bad. I think that going from the black face to stainless steel to the white lucite background is a very big tonal shift, and I haven't yet quite figured out how to really expose the bracketed shots, but the black face did come out better than if it was a single shot. However, this was worked in PS after the images were combined. I thought that the face was a bit flat so I rendered a spot light in PS (which is what I almost always do anyway) and it brightened it up nicely. I also thought the background was a bit dark so I duplicated the layer, lightened that up to where I thought it looked good and then made a mask and erased what I didn't want to show what I did want to see underneath.
The drawbacks are that whatever you're shooting has to be stationary. Moving watch hands are a bit of an issue. I was using a small daylight-balanced flourescent lightbox so I had to pull the stem and hack the movement. Then some PS magic and - voila! - stem's back where it belongs. Using strobes would be the way to go if the second hand is running. You would just have to make sure that all your exposures had the second hand in the same place.
I'm seriously thinking of getting Photomatix Pro, which is a stand alone with PS plug-ins for this. My colleague and I have been experimenting a bit in the office and we both like what we're seeing.
Anyone else tried this?
-Ben
This first image is the unretouched single "correct" exposure (f/32 @ 1 second):
The second image is the unretouched fusion of the 3 images:
The fused image really shows what you can do with the HDR process. With some minor tweaking this would be a perfectly acceptable image, but gives a great jumping off point to do pretty much anything you can think of doing with your photographs.
And this image is what I ended up doing with it:
I've a long way to go in experimenting, but this isn't bad. I think that going from the black face to stainless steel to the white lucite background is a very big tonal shift, and I haven't yet quite figured out how to really expose the bracketed shots, but the black face did come out better than if it was a single shot. However, this was worked in PS after the images were combined. I thought that the face was a bit flat so I rendered a spot light in PS (which is what I almost always do anyway) and it brightened it up nicely. I also thought the background was a bit dark so I duplicated the layer, lightened that up to where I thought it looked good and then made a mask and erased what I didn't want to show what I did want to see underneath.
The drawbacks are that whatever you're shooting has to be stationary. Moving watch hands are a bit of an issue. I was using a small daylight-balanced flourescent lightbox so I had to pull the stem and hack the movement. Then some PS magic and - voila! - stem's back where it belongs. Using strobes would be the way to go if the second hand is running. You would just have to make sure that all your exposures had the second hand in the same place.
I'm seriously thinking of getting Photomatix Pro, which is a stand alone with PS plug-ins for this. My colleague and I have been experimenting a bit in the office and we both like what we're seeing.
Anyone else tried this?
-Ben
