Photography Tips / Locations

Faking HDR
High Dynamic Range photography is a process of taking multiple exposures and combining them into one picture with a wider dynamic range than usual. (You can learn more about it HERE)
The only problem is that HDR photos generally need a tripod, and enough time to take at least 2 or 3 shots. A while back we were on a Hot Air Balloon Ride, and I wanted to take a picture of the sun hiding behind some clouds.
Origional photo, dark landscape (We already had a lot of great shots of the view from the basket, but most of these had skies that were a bit overexposed)

Playing around with the raw file I noticed you could have the sky exposed properly, or you could bump up the exposure and have the ground exposed properly... but not both.

I duplicated the raw file, exposed one for the sky, one for the ground and merged them in Photoshop. I then masked out the sky in one version and had a reasonable picture.
Above is the picture as taken.
Below is the picture with the exposure cranked up 2 stops.
Final Pic, proper exposure
Same photo, sky blown out
The composite Picture
This tutorial is a very basic. Advanced photoshop users should have gotten the idea from the above description. Read the Smart-Objects trick at the beginning of the tutorial, then just incorporate it into your own workflow
Here is the best way I have found of doing these multiple exposures in photoshop CS3 :

Open the raw file you want to edit in Photoshop's raw dialogue box. Either by double-clicking it in the Explorer window, or open bridge, navigate to your image and double click.

Inside the raw dialogue box, adjust your picture's exposure until the sky looks the way you want it. Don't worry about the ground at all.
Faking HDR - Raw window - underexposed
There are clearly some areas that are underexposed (the blue areas have no information in them, they are purely black). Ignore everything except the sky.

You can turn off the blue or red (see box below) parts of the image by clicking on the triangles in the corners of the histogram that is in the top right corner of the raw box.



If you have overexposed the sky, there might me some areas you can't recover. These areas can look bad (see Buffalo below).

Hold down the Shift key, and the open box will turn into an 'open object' box. Click the 'open object' box.

Go to Layer>Smart Objects>New Smart Object via copy. DON'T just press CTRL J or drag the layer to the new layer button. New layer via copy will allow you to adjust the two layers separately. Any adjustments made on the original layer via CTRL J will affect BOTH copies.

Rename the top layer Sky and the bottom layer Ground (to rename a layer double click the layer's name in the layer palette)

Double-click on the Ground layer thumbnail in the layer pallet to open it in the raw dialogue box.

Adjust the exposure for the ground. Ignore what is happening to the sky. If you have underexposed the dark areas use the raw dialogue's box to reduce the noise under details (it's the triangle with the blurry triangle behind it -under the graph in the top right.)
Faking HDR - Raw window - overexposure
The bright red areas you see are areas that are overexposed. There is no detail information there, only pure white. There is also very little information in the rest of the sky. This is fine, just set the ground exposure how you want it to look.
In the layers palette, select the top layer (the sky layer), and add a mask.

Select the mask in the sky layer (click on the white box next to the thumbnail). Select the brush tool from the tools palette.

Press D to set your colors to the default Black and White
Faking HDR - Foreground and Background Colours
At the bottom of your tools Palette is your foreground and background color.

Pressing X will swap the foreground and background color. This is very handy when painting masks. If you make a mistake painting with white, hit the X key to switch to black, and paint it back.

We are going to paint the mask with black and white, where black will make the top layer transparent, and white will make it opaque.

Use the brush to erase parts of the top image, and reveal the bottom layer below.

In my image I erased the ground, the bird blind and some of the bigger branches.
Hint:

You can control the size of your brush by using the left square bracket to make it smaller, and the right square bracket to make it larger (the square brackets are right beside the P button). You can quickly paint large areas of the screen, then shrink it down and paint in small details.
Faking HDR - Composite Pictures
I chose this image because it's a lot harder than the balloon version at the top of the page. The little twigs at the top of the picture are almost impossible to do one at a time.

I chose to make some twigs lighter by painting the mask with a lighter shade of grey. This lightens the branches up, without making the sky noticeably lighter in that area.
Buffalo proper exposure Here is another example from our Mountsberg hike. The snow was too bright, and the buffalo too dark, so either the snow was all blown out, or the buffalo was a dark hole. I masked out the buffalo, and exposed him properly, then on a separate layer I exposed the snow properly.

Because the snow and the dark buffalo were such a high contrast, I still lost some detail in the snow This is where a true HDR image would have been much better.