Found a new method for doing Landscape HDRs

jdorseydesign

So, I was messing around with photoshop and lightroom and I came up with a new way to do HDRs for landscapes.

I used the following two shots.


Overexposed Sky by jdorseydesign, on Flickr


Underexposed Land by jdorseydesign, on Flickr

I right clicked on them in Lightroom and did the normal Edit.. Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop.

Then, instead of doing tone mapping in Photoshop, I simply chose the 32-bit option.



Then, saved the file and it sent me back to lightroom. At this point, the sky still looked WAY overexposed, so I just used Lightroom's Graduated Filter with the exposure slider to darken the Sky, and TADA, it pulls down the sky and because it's a 32-bit file with tons of dynamic range, I get the original Sky from the photo where the sky was exposed properly with the land that was exposed properly. Then I did my usual lightroom adjustments to make the photo pop.

The result, is something that looks very natural almost as though I used a REAL neutral density filter.

I've done this before by using layers and layer masks in photoshop, but this method was way easier and I think the results look really good.

I hope this helps others use this technique


Sunset Point Mt Nebo State Park by jdorseydesign, on Flickr

Sam

Thanks for posting your tutorial. It would be interesting if you could post a link to the original files and let people play with them to see how other methods stack up to what you discovered.

Sam

kdog

Nice results, J! Thank you for sharing your discovery.

mbonocore

Nice find! I love 32-bit. I haven't tonemapped in 6 months. I use Photomatix. Here is a great tutorial.

http://www.wheretowillie.com/photography-tutorials/32-bit-hdr-tutorial/

Michael

PGM

This looks terrific to me, and much more natural than some HDR photos. Thanks for sharing. Best, Pam

JimKarczewski

I had too many issues with photomatix, especially with halos. I went to Nik HDR Pro 2 (sorry, should be Google Nik now) Best $99 I've ever spent considering I own all of the plugins now thanks to googles takeover of Nik, if you bought it recently you get them all!

But, as I said, I had issued with bad halo's around trees with photomatix. I did have a similar issue with Nik the other day but figured it out myself (while on the phone with support that is, but still found it myself. D'oh) That if you use a different reference image for the "reduce movement" it can have a huge impact on if you get/don't get halo's. I was pissed because it was the first time I saw halo's in Nik, couldn't seem to find anything to change other than completely turning off the "reduce movement" until I called support and noticed the "reference image" at top for movement. Clicked a different one and it worked like a champ.

That being said, I'm not doing a hell of a lot of landscapes lately. More urbanscapes where this technique would be difficult to pull off due to no clear horizon.



As you can see, the poles sticking into the dark sky still have some artifacting going on around them, but not nearly as bad as when I had a different reference image.