HDR Tutorial: How to Create Artistic Images

By Deborah Sandidge

On my way to Savannah, Georgia, I stopped to check out a location called Jekyll Island. It's beautiful and offers great potential at sunrise and sunset. Mid-afternoon, driftwood and a cloudy blue sky created an opportunity for photography in HDR.

HDR, or High Dynamic Range photography, reveals more detail in the shadow, highlight and mid-tone areas of a scene. HDR, along with detail, color and exposure enhancing software, enables you to create a more compelling artistic image than a single photo straight from the camera. It's wonderful to have these creative options available to the digital photographer!

Here's a quick HDR tutorial: I made three exposures two stops apart, the "correct" exposure, 2+ and 2-, and used Photomatix to generate the HDR photo shown below. The latest version Photomatix 3.2 and the Tone Mapping filter has great starting points for processing HDR images.

You can produce HDR photography that has a grunge look by using the Grunge slider, a realistic rendition using the Natural preset, and anything in between. With this image, the "Smooth Skies" preset and a few adjustments to the various sliders created a look that complemented the image. Have fun shooting...

NOTE: Check out BetterPhoto.com's photography courses online, which includes an online photo class on Digital Infrared Photography by Deb Sandidge and an HDR Tutorial by Tony Sweet.

Jekyll Island HDR photo copyright Deborah Sandidge

Comments

[software development in Surrey]

Hey, that was interesting,
Wow! i want to go to that place jeckyll island,
You picture makes it look beautiful,
Anyway, thanks for the post

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Hey, that was interesting,
Wow! i want to go to that place jeckyll island,
You picture makes it look beautiful,
Anyway, thanks for the post