Night shot using CS2 HDR feature

Higgmeister

Hi All,
Been so busy lately but I actually snuck in an hour to try the High Dynamic Range (HDR) feature of CS2. Basically what this does is take shots that have been bracketed and combine them into a 32 bit file (BIG). It's similar to stacking for greater dynamic range, but it aligns the files for you. The instructions state the scene needs to be static, but here I have water and clouds that were moving. The camera was tripod mounted. I used the Adaptive method to downsampling to 16 bit for some additional tweaking, then down to 8 bit for this image. All this was relatively easy and quick (less than an hour) which also included some perspective cropping.

EXIF data is not preserved, but each shot (3 shots total) was between 20 and 30 seconds, F11-F22 using the 17-55 kit lens on a 20D.


I hope to get more time soon so I can comment on more photos (so many nice ones). I do try and sneak in some time to look, but not enough time to comment lately.

Gotta run and comments are always welcome,
Chris

Nir

Very cool Chris! and nice shot(s)!

Going to look for HDR now...

Hikin' Mike

I like it! I can see a little "movement" in the clouds, but that's because I've done a few HDR's myself and had the same results.


Great image!

Nir

Chris,

Found it in the 'help' but can't find 'merge to HDR' in the application. Can you give me a hint?

**** scratch last request - found it ****

Higgmeister

Nir wrote:

Chris,

Found it in the 'help' but can't find 'merge to HDR' in the application. Can you give me a hint?

**** scratch last request - found it ****

OK, just for the others though. I guess there are two ways to do this, the way I did it was from the Bridge application. I highlighted the 3 photos, then went to **See John's post below- File/automate/merge to HDR** and selected 'merge to HDR". It then asked for you to select the white point (which I probably goofed on for this shot) and then it processes the picture. There are not many adjustments you can do under the 32bit mode so you must downsample to 16 or 8 bit mode (I recommend the 16bit mode to work on it). There are 4 different ways to sample down so I chose what I thought had the most control. Took awhile to figure out what I was doing. I found this all out using a book I bought from Amazon called:
[font=verdana,arial,helvetica][size=-1]Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Photographers: A Professional Image Editor's Guide to the Creative Use of Photoshop for the Macintosh and PC -- by Martin Evening

Hope this helps someone else out as well,
Chris
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John Mueller

Nice one.I been playing a little with this feature and havent had much luck,but I like it.

Nir,file/automate/merge to HDR

Higgmeister

Thanks Mike and Nir and John
I shot these with HDR in mind, but just got around to getting it processed. So far behind. I actually went out that night to shoot the old Reno sign for the call for location photos. I got the shot but haven't had time to process yet so I missed the deadline. Oh Well.
What's funny is it looks a little low in contrast. The histogram from CS2 was pretty even and full (from side to side) so I'm not sure if this is the result of HDR conversion or not. Need to play more. Mike, did you see this (low contrast with a good histogram) with the ones you did?

Thanks for the comments,
Chris

Hikin' Mike

I don't remember the histogram and honestly wouldn't know what to make of it. I have the file at home. I'll look at it and maybe post the image too.