The Future of HDR - II

Whether its DVDs, videos, or books – High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is flourishing with Lightroom 2 (LR) and Photoshop CS4(PS).

The authors shown above

John Doogan FNZIPP (and Adobe Ambassador),

Ben Willmore (HDR & Beyond), and

Matt Kloskowski NAPP (DVD)

take different approaches.

Last Thursday’s Future of HDR was prelude to a central question, “Where and how will our future growth proceed in digital photography as we use better cameras to provide HDR images which represent what our eye actually saw?”

What Does Each Approach Offer?

While I have not seen Kloskowski’s HDR DVD, I have seen his Lightroom DVD. His approach is simple; a nuts and bolts use of Lightroom rather than enhanced tool application. I presume he uses Photomatix for HDR the same way. I can’t speak to his tone mapping approach.

Ben Willmore briefly touched on his HDR approach in two short CS3 videos with Bert Monroy. The first shows how to use CS3 to Merge to HDR to align and create an initial image. The second uses CS3 brightness and other advanced masking tools (curves) to more carefully tone map images. He has a book out next month entitled HDR and Beyond with CS4.

John Doogan’s videos spend 2 hours skillfully showing how to use several HDR approaches. In New and Improved Adobe Photomerge and Merge to HDR in Photoshop CS4, he uses Lightroom to Merge to HDR, then either applies CS4 layer adjustments or Lightroom nondestructive graduated filters or local adjustment brushes to enhance and add subtle changes to his HDR images. As a nature photographer, I enjoyed his Landscape Photographers Guide to Lightroom and CS4. Both can be viewed on video by clicking on each title below.

My HDR Experience

I began using HDR in October, 2007. For perspective, that was 6 months after the Photoshop CS3 release. At that time, few reviews suggested use of CS3 and its HDR capabilities. Rather, Photomatix Pro was hero from that day.

As I’ve worked with CS3 and Photomatix, one interesting reaction has been, “That image seems to be ‘science-fiction’ – meaning, it’s over done.” Hindsight, centered around shooting Magic Hour shots, that period between dawn and dusk, suggests HDR should be approached carefully with Photomatix. Use of Detail Enhancer (DE) provides a histogram which rarely seems to fit the general histogram shape from the initial capture image. On the other hand, Tone Compressor (TC) seems to be more consistent; it maintains similar histogram configurations. While DE has numerous knobs and dials for tone mapping, TC only has half that amount.

When you think of dodging and burning in CS3 as well as exciting new graduated filter and adjustment brushes in Lightroom 2 (and CS4) ~ that impressive tone mapping list shows Photomatix appearing to strongly lag behind. Moreover, those local nondestructive Adobe Camera Raw 5.x brushes allow us to swiftly add subtle clipping, recovery, fill light, shadows, brightness, clarity, vibrance, sharpness, auto align, auto blend, etc.

When compared to combinations of various tools used in tone mapping from Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4 – the few global Photomatix knobs and dials, which only treat a global image, seem to become minor.

Brief Historical Perspective

So, what can we learn by perusing noted experts and their present approaches to HDR?

HDR began to appear through tutorials from different photographers. Early on it was Photomatix, but in 2008, Bridge and CS3 became prevalent. With release of LR2 in September, 2008 and CS4, October, 2008, Adobe Camera Raw, the underpinning of both, had become an active local brush adjustment environment. Workflow steps taking hours are reduced to 10s of minutes.

Now, HDR found a new home with more subtle nuances to its plethora of image corrections. I think advent of Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4 as a combo puts us in a better tone mapping situation to softly, yet persistently enhance HDR. Several people are using Merge to HDR from Lightroom. Then they go on to use the sophistication of LR/PS. Of course, you will want to find your ‘guru’ or gurus’ and follow them… Adobe eSeminars provides you both HDR and additional topics.

As you become facile in use of various combo brushes, you will produce subtle, yet evocative HDR images – eschewing that old paradigm – HDR ‘science fiction’. And, should you be interested, we think you may become leaders in helping judges, sometimes rutted in tradition, widen their horizons…

Where Few Men Have Gone Before…

For me, CS4 is definitely on the near horizon; specifically because of some of the intricate steps Doogan’s 2 videos showed me - which work only with LR and CS4. With local nondestructive tools applied to different segments of an HDR image, we suggest a pen tablet for precision in advanced tone map modifications.

Doogan
HDR
Landscapes
Willmore
HDR I
HDR II
HDR and Beyond
Klowkowski
HDR DVD
Kelby
Lightroom 2 Book (p. 262-267)
Revell
HDR Tutorials
Adobe eSeminars OnDemand
Various HDR and CS4 Topics

Out of the Box…

My people photography skills simply haven't been well honed.  So you'd expect I wouldn't look at wedding photography.
But, I became a devotee of David Ziser about the time we headed into recession/depression.  Every Thursday, David will write a business blog about some aspect of photography.  Occasionally, he’d tout one of his free videos.

One day, David showed up with a pool shot after sunset.  The sky was quite dark and the pool had green water – a marked color difference between sky and pool.
David’s Evening Blues video created a colorful transition ~ he brought out the sunset and colored the pool a deep blue – in concert with the sky colors.
Beyond that, it was a very interesting lesson in making subtle color changes to strengthen an image.  Naturally, it gave me a sense of how to use color in both Lightroom and Photoshop CS3.
Since then, whenever I get the chance, I imbibe my color senses in various David Ziser videos.  While I might be learning a little bit about wedding photography, I'm really learning about ever so subtle color enhancements and presentation styles.

Guess you could say I'm trying to think/learn out of the box...
Thanks, David!
Enjoy…

Ship Rock

Places that really strike me have features in common. Harsh powerful grandeur, graduations of colors, tortured eroded shapes…

All are empty and lonely. They invoke a sense of both space and strangeness. All have a fierce inhospitality, an infinite variety of desolate beauty…

Man is not himself only, but a changing pattern of immediate experiences. He has all he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources; half noted, or noted not at all except by some sense that lies too deep to name. He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its dusty, dry valleys, the subtle delicacy of its pastel evening colors. If there is in this country of his abiding, no more than a single resplendent color, such as the splendid wine of sunsets built along Ship Rock, he takes it in and gives it forth again in directions and occasions least suspected by himself, as a manner, as music, as his wind song, as a prevailing tone of thought, as the line of his camera’s eye, and, finally, the pattern of his personal growth.

This sense, always at work in Man, takes up and turns into beauty the stuff of his sensory contacts. It works so deeply in him its only notice of perpetual activity is a profound contentment in the presence of the thing it most works upon.

By land, I mean all those things common to a given region: flow of prevailing winds; legends of ancient life; and the scene ~ above everything a magnificently shaped and colored scene. Operating subtly below all other types of adjusted experience, these are things most quickly and surely passed from generation to generation, marked in the face of all daunting or neglectful things a land can do to its human inhabitants, by that piece of inward content, the index of race beginning.

By ancient life, I mean both planetary origin and life lived on the land. Ship Rock was formed as the throat to an ancient volcano 30 million years ago. A volcanic ray - thirty or forty feet high but only about three feet thick - wanders like the Great Wall of China southward from Ship Rock. Molten magma squeezed up through the cracked earth. Up the wall to the north, the core of old Ship Rock volcano rose a thousand feet against the sky, like a free-form version of a Gothic cathedral. Gothic, too, was the color — the stone reflecting soft sunset umbers. Balanced on the wind just over the wall, a red-tailed hawk hunted a rodent to kill. A million years of frost and heat cracked this dike as chunks have fallen out.

Before that, from 700 AD to ~ 1300 AD, the Anasazi lived all over this land. Their time honored legacy of remarkable stone dwellings is legendary!

I would want Ship Rock to look exactly like this. The Navajo call it Tse’ bit’ a’i – Rock with Wings. What about deeds done by Monster Slayer here in the time of Navajo myth? Monster Slayer, climbing the vertical stone of Ship Rock toward the nest of the Winged Monsters to kill them and make this landscape safe for the Navajos. Monster Slayer, at the nest, taught the Monsters' chicks to become the eagle and the owl. Monster Slayer rescued from his impossible perch by the sacred Spider Woman.

On a day I most like to remember, gusting wind pressed me against the dike’s west wall. This wind was advance guard of a front sweeping eastward out of Arizona and Utah. It bombarded Ship Rock with long tendrils of cirrus clouds against blue sky, sending dust devils skittering across the prairie. Ship Rock, the dike, and sunset's pastel hues provide a truly evocative memory of the West.

It’s been such a deep pleasure to read Hillerman and traverse his Beloved Land! Adapted from Tony Hillerman’s consistent influence on the Southwest; his Spell of New Mexico is well known for its portrayal of New Mexico’s contribution to the Four Corners. Mary Austin, cited in Spell, wrote a provocative piece on man which gave me much pause for thought.