HDR Tutorial po polsku (Polish Translation)

HDR Tutorial po polsku

Today post will be different in a sense that it is targeted towards my Polish readers... so the rest of this post will be written in my native languange :) It's an exception - for posts written in English visit my blog again in a few days time.

Od dłuższego już czasu wiele osób prosiło mnie o udostępnienie mojego poradnika dotyczącego fotografii HDR w języku polskim i dziś mam przyjemność ogłosić, że zakończyłem proces tłumaczenia z języka angielskiego i poradnik jest dostępny, oczywiście za darmo, do ściągnięcia z mojego bloga:

http://goo.gl/wZ3gom

Generalnie zawiera on niemal wszystko to co wersja angielska, z wyjątkiem części Dodatki, opisującej pewne szczególne zastosowania HDR oraz bardziej specjalistyczne narzędzia. Nauczysz się z niego zatem:

• teoretycznych podstaw fotografii HDR,
• jak robić zdjęcia HDR,
• jak rozwiązywać typowe problemy występujące w przypadku fotografii HDR,
• jak wykorzystywać program Photomatix Pro do obróbki zdjęć HDR - przy czym nacisk został położony na uzyskanie naturalnie wyglądających zdjęć HDR.

Jeśli odzew będzie pozytywny, prawdopodobnie dodam te brakujące fragmenty do poradnika. Ponadto w kolejnych tygodniach zamierzam poświęcić jeszcze nieco czasu na dopracowanie aktualnej wersji, poprawienie niektórych sformułowań, itp. ale możesz już teraz skorzystać z tego poradnika.

Oczywiście czekam na sugestie i komentarze. A może coś jest niejasne? Coś poprawić? Postaram się udoskonalać poradnik w miarę możliwości tak, aby był jak najbardziej przystępny.

I na zakończenie - czemu tłumaczenie trwało tak długo? Cóż, jest kilka powodów. Po pierwsze jest to bardzo długi tekst, do tego zawierający sporo technicznych sformułowań, które dość ciężko przetłumaczyć na język polski, bo nie ma w nim jeszcze dobrych odpowiedników. Po drugie pisaniem tutoriali, poradników czy artykułów zajmuję się wyłącznie w czasie wolnym, nie zarabiam na tym. Generalnie wolę poświęcić tę niewielką ilość czasu na pisanie nowych tekstów niż tłumaczenie starych.

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HDR photography tip: how many photos do I need for great HDR photo?

HDR photography tip: How many photos do I need for great HDR photo?

Today I have a short tip for you, fellow HDR photographers. Have you ever wondered, while taking HDR photo, how many bracketed photos you should take for a given scene? 3, 5, 7 or even more? Or maybe just 1? Most photographers make wild guesses here, often taking way too many photos (I often do the same so don't feel guilty!) what can result in ghosting artifacts. Or even worse - too few what results in blown out highlights and/or noisy shadows.

Guess no more - here are the steps to take correct number of bracketed photos:

1. Set your camera to Spot Metering mode. 
2. Set ISO to the one you will use for your HDR photo (I recommend using lowest value possible). And definitely don't use Auto-ISO.
3. Switch to Aperture Priority mode (denoted as Av or A). Set Aperture to the value you will use for your HDR photo.
4. Point your camera at the brightest spot you want to include in your frame (eg. source light, sky) and note down exposure time displayed by the camera, eg. 1/400.
5. Now point your camera at the darkest spot you want to include in your frame (eg. shadow, dark rocks) and note down exposure time displayed by the camera, eg. 1/40.
6. Switch to Manual mode. Don't change neither ISO nor Aperture!
7. Now let's assume that you want to take your photos spacing them by 1 EV. In such case, start with exposure for brightest spot (in our case 1/400), take a photo, multiply exposure by 2 (it then becomes 1/200), take another photo, multiply exposure by 2 and so on until you take a photo with exposure which is greater or equal than exposure for darkest point (in our case 1/40).
   So in our case we would need to take photos at following exposures:
1. 1/400
2. 1/200
3. 1/100
4. 1/50 (this exposure is still shorter than longest exposure we need)
5. 1/25
8. As you can seen we would need 5 photos.
   There is one problem though - this approach requires using fully Manual mode. What if you would like to take photos using Aperture Priority mode and use auto-bracketing? Then instead of taking photos in Step 6, let's calculate number of exposures (you can then set it for auto-bracketing feature of your camera):
   
   
   number_of_photos = log2(slowest_exposure / fastest_esposure) + 1
   In our case it becomes:
   
   number_of_photos = log2((1/25) / (1/400)) + 1 = log2(16) + 1 = 4 + 1 = 5

Also note that if you would like to use 2 EV spacing you would need to multiply exposures by 4.

You can find more tips and useful HDR photography information in my free HDR tutorial.

Daily photo - In the Park

Today I decided to share this HDR photo taken in one of the London's parks.

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Realistic HDR images using Contrast Optimizer in Photomatix Pro 5

Introduction

As you probably know, one of the many changes introduced in Photomatix Pro 5, was addition of 2 new processing methods:

• Contrast Optimizer and
• Fusion/Real-Estate 

Both can produce very natural looking images but today I would like to focus on the first of them.
When I first tried Contrast Optimizer while we were still implementing changes for Photomatix Pro 5 at HDRsoft I immediately felt in love with this tone-mapper. It produces results which I always wanted and made my workflow a lot easier. Ever since then Contrast Optimizer has become processing method of my choice - I use it almost exclusively for majority of my new high dynamic range photos.

What I love about is, is that its output is very clean, natural, halo-free, has nice clarity and can be processed even further in Photoshop. It's closer to Lightroom's tone-mapper (yes... Lightroom does tonemap images too) than to Details Enhancer. Also it's one of the simplest to master methods available in Photomatix Pro as default preset, which is Balanced, is great already. I usually just move one or two sliders and I'm done. It doesn't require me to spend several minutes fiddling with the settings. Also I found out that it can produce results similar to Oloneo in terms of naturalness and realisticness. So if you're fan of Oloneo Photo Engine you might want to give Photomatix's Contrast Optimizer a test drive.

Although Contrast Optimizer works best for me when doing natural HDR processing, it can be also used to produce more surreal or grungy type of effects. Even though I'm advocate of natural tone-mapping there are cases when this might be useful, eg. in so called urbex photography (which means 'urban exploration') which are often quite heavy on the post-processing to produce this very special mood of loneliness, danger, etc. However, I'm not expert on this. In fact I have never captured any urbex photo.

Using Contrast Optimizer

Now, back to Contrast Optimizer. Generally speaking, as I already mentioned, default options for Contrast Optimizer are a good starting point because they produce natural looking images already. There are, however, a couple adjustments that you might want to make.

1. The first thing I usually do is to drag Lighting Effect slider to 0. This works really well for landscapes. However, for night scenes in the city it is often better to leave this slider on its default, i.e. 20 because this slider is responsible for prominence of shadows (and in landscape scenes making them brighter might result in surreal look).
2. In some cases doing above might darken the image. If so, there is easy fix - drag Midtone slider a bit to the right (to around 2.0 - 3.5). Alternative would be to move Strength to the right to around 55 - 60.
3. Often I also decrease White Clipping and Black Clipping to avoid clipping highlights and shadows respectively. Note that although it's often good to drag Black Clipping as far as to 0, it's not always the best idea for the other option. Usually you have some bright highlights in your photo (like sun, bright sky, street lamps, etc.). If you drag White Clipping to 0, they will look a bit dull and artificial. So in case you have strong light sources in your image, I suggest to go to around 1.5 - 3.0 depending on the image.

And that's basically all the changes you need to make to make your image look really great and natural.

But if you're still not happy with the results, try dragging either Strength or Tone Compression just a little bit to the left.

Finally, one interesting thing. If you have a single LDR (low dynamic range) photo you might also see great improvement in how it looks when you use Contrast Optimizer on it. The effect of using Contrast Optimizer in such case are better colours and clarity. Just load your single LDR image into Photomatix Pro, select Balanced preset and voila - exposure and colours of your image will be generally much better.

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Tutorial: Removing colour cast from photos in Photoshop

It often happens that our photos have some sort of colour cast. This can be introduced by using wrong colour balance when taking a photo or during post-processing.

In this tutorial I will show you a few ways on how to get rid of this issue from your photos. The techniques presented here will go from the very basic automatic ones, to a bit more advanced requiring some use of Photoshop tools.

Please also note that each of below methods might yield slighly different result and not all of them will work equally good for all photos, so it's good to know several techniques.

Here is the image I'll be working with today:

It has slightly exaggerated colour cast which will be useful to illustrate various method of removing it. There is definitely too much purple or blue in the image what's especially visible in sand on the left.

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Saturation vs Vibrance - what's the difference?

When I started using Adobe Lightroom a few years ago, one of the things that caused my biggest confusion was what had been the difference between Saturation and Vibrance sliders. They both seemed to affect saturation and vividness of colours but the results they gave weren't identical.

And that is true - although both sliders boost saturation of colours, they do this in a slightly different manner. Here's an example.

Below you can see original image I took on Lanzarote islands, Canary Islands. The image showing volcanones has pretty low saturation so I decided to improve it:

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Tutorial: Add sunset glow

Sometimes sunsets aren't as warm as we would like them to be, they miss this very nice warm glow around the sun... But fortunately adding this glow (or making it more pronounced) is very easy and today I'll show you how to do this in Photoshop.

Written version

If you don't want to watch video tutorial or prefer tutorials in written form, here are the steps I took to create this effect in the video above:

1. Create new empty layer by selecting Layer -> New Layer from main menu and change its name to Sunset glow.
2. Add layer mask to Sunset glow layer.
3. Select newly added layer mask, make sure you have white colour for Foreground and black for Background selected.
4. Select Gradient tool and make sure Radial Gradient is selected.
5. Draw gradient starting from the sun down. This is to limit effect of your sunset glow effect.
6. Select your Background layer and sample it near the sun area using Eyedropper Tool. Basically you should get golden, orange, yellow or other warm tone.
7. Select Sunset glow layer again, select Paint Bucket tool and fill layer with previously selected golden colour.
8. Change blending mode of Sunset glow layer to Overlay or Soft Light and decrease its opacity to around 20 - 40% depending on the effect you want to achieve.
9. Now you're done. However, you might want to adjust layer mask of Sunset glow layer to further limit the range of this effect.

Below you can see sample image to which I applied this easy technique. If you would like to see original image simply move your mouse pointer over the image. Image is much warmer and in my opinion simply looks more pleasant.

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Tutorial: Picking your best photos. How to?

You probably know this feeling very well. You're back from a trip or a photo shoot, you import your images from memory card onto your hard drive and you realize there are hundreds or thousands of them. What's more, many of them are very similar or almost identical with only slight changes in composition, exposure or focal length used. For me this realization is always very tough as I know it means a looot of work. And these image also occupy a lot of space on your hard drive.

But luckily not all of the photos are good enough to be shared or processed - in fact you will never decide to process vast majority of them. It's very important that photographer is good editor at the same time. You need to be able to pick your best photos and develop them. You also have to be able to reject and delete photos that aren't good enough as there is no need and point in spending time on images that even you don't like.

This image illustrates some of the concepts described in this tutorial. First of all note, that all photos are groupped into stacks (number in the thumbnail corner tells how many images are in the stack). This makes the catalogue less cluttered. Then, some of the photos have 5 star rating - it means that they are worth to be processed. Some of the stacks are marked as rejected (note black flag with "x" in it in thumbnail left corner) and some are also marked as picks (white flag in top left corner of image thumbnail) - i.e. worth processing. Also note that I use various different colours - I use green colour to mark the photos I already processed and red colour for photos that I especially like and really really want to process them.

So today I would like to share with you some easy tips I use to pick my best photos (ones that I would like to process) using Adobe Lightroom. Although I use Lightroom to catalogue my photos, some of the below concepts are more general:

1. First and most important. Give yourself a few days rest from the images. Working on images just after taking them is never a good idea. Photographer has stronger connection to his images than any viewer will ever have. For you photo is probably something more than just image - it's related to some memories, feelings or emotions. But for your viewers, image is image. Nothing more. If it's not interesting even the best story below it, won't change that. By giving yourself a few days or weeks, you become more similar in assessing your photos to your average viewer (as memories start to fade away a little bit).
   I usually start working on my images 2 to 4 weeks after taking them (there are sometimes exceptions to this rule though).
2. Then I start to go through my photos and group similar looking images (ones with similar composition, exposure etc.). This way I can show one image per group and thus reduce amount of images displayed in my Lightroom catalogue. I use stacks in Lightroom for this purpose (to create stack just select similar photos and use CTRL + G shortcut). Stacks are nothing else than groups or folders that you can collapse and expand. After stacking images make sure to collapse stack so it takes less space in Grid view thus making it less cluttered.
3. As you go through your photos and notice some really spectacular image that stands out from the rest, mark it as good one so you remember later to process it. Otherwise you can miss it later and forget about it. I usually use Pick flag in Lightroom (CTRL + UP ARROW) or high rating (4 on your keyboard for four stars and 5 for five stars). Additionaly you can mark your good photos with colour so they are more visible in the Grid view. I often use Red colour for this. This is especially useful if you have thousand of unprocessed images in your Lightroom catalogue. When I'm looking for an image for processing while scrolling through my images, this Red colour quickly attracts my attention.
4. Sometimes you will also notice some spectacular fails at this stage (like completely out of focus image due to the fact someone accidentally tripped over your tripod and moved it... yeah it happens). I mark such photos with Rejected flag (CTRL + DOWN ARROW). It means that I have to delete it later. Marking with Rejected flag has one more big advantage. You can remove all rejected photos at once by going to Photo -> Delete Rejected Photos (or by hitting CTRL + BACKSPACE).
5. Now with your images grouped into stacks the real fun begins. I go through the list once again (for each group only one photo is displayed so there are much less photos) and try to pick the best of the stacks by using Pick flag (or high rating) again. I also try to Reject stacks that I don't like at all. If I reject whole stack it means that I reject all photos in it.
6. After rejecting the stacks that I don't like I start to look for images to process finally. I usually start with stacks or photos that got either high rating (5 stars) or which I marked as Picks. I then enter such stack and compare the images inside it, trying to select the best of them. I take a lot of things into consideration, eg. whether exposure is correct, whether photo is razor sharp or whether I like composition. During this phase I usually reject photos that are slightly out of focus, have their horizon off, have some subjects clipped on either side, etc.
7. I end up with one or two photos inside a stack and select one of them to process. Finally :)
8. Then I start processing my chosen photo :)
9. Once the image is developed I mark it with colour label (most usually green by pressing 8 key) so it shows differently in the Library module and I know that I already dealt with this image and I shouldn't care about it.

These steps might sound like a long and tedious task but they often save me a lot of time later (not to mention disk space) and thanks to them I usually process the images that I really like.

South Kensington underground station in London, United Kingdom. Normally this place is really busy as South Kensington station is just a few meters from some of the London top museums (Natural History Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum and Science Museum). To get this photo without people I visited it late in the evening (when museums were closed already) and it was pretty much deserted.

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