Do It Yourself HDR Photos

These days I have a side business where I shoot homes for realtors who are looking to improve their marketability by getting better images for their websites and printed materials. I’ll go to homes and take a series of photos of the exterior and the interiors for the agents and deliver full sized and web sized (MLS) photos all color corrected and finished. Check out my website here. Believe me this is a lot tougher than it sounds and takes a good eye and a lot of practice. Maybe in the future I’ll do a post on shooting interiors, but in this post I’ll show you one of the methods I use for my exterior shots when I’m in a pinch. 

When shooting real estate photos I shoot bracketed photos 90% of the time and use various software programs to blend the images. By shooting bracketed shots, I can capture more of the highlights and shadows which help me get a better finished shot. Clear days with some nice clouds are ideal, but that isn’t the case most of the time. Some days you just can’t get to the home early enough in the morning or late enough in the afternoon (depending on which direction the home faces) and you need to have some ‘magic tricks’ in your hat to help you get your shot. In this tutorial I’ll show you a work-around I use in the rare times when I only have a single image to work on. In this case it’s I’ll be using one of my HDR programs to do my magic. I hope you like it. 

When I’m out driving around, I’m always looking for homes that might make a nice image for my real estate website. Unfortunately on the day I shot this home I was on my motorcycle, I had a camera with me but didn’t have a tripod.  It was taken around 2 in the afternoon so I wasn’t able to get a decent exposure on the sky and the front of the home in a single shot but I really liked the clouds and knew it had some potential.   If I was going to get a nice shot of this home, I would use one of my magic tricks. To start, I would have to make three copies of my photo so that I could process them like an HDR image. Ironically, this home ended up being on the opening page of my website until I find a home that I like better.

My regular workflow process starts by opening my original images (in this case my single image) in Camera RAW and adjusting the Contrast, Blacks and Clarity sliders. After making those adjustments, I then underexposed it by one full stop and open it as a copy in Photoshop so I can save it as a TIFF. This image I will name Dark.

Neutral Copy

Now I go back into Camera RAW and open my original again. I make sure its Exposure is set to neutral (0) keeping my other adjustments I made on the first image (Contrast, Blacks and Clarity sliders) and then I bring it into Photoshop and save it as a TIFF and name this one Neutral.  

Over Copy

Now I open the original a third time in RAW, raise the Exposure on it by one full stop, then bring it into Photoshop and save it as a TIFF called Over.  The reason I’m saving them as TIFF files is the fact that if I need to, I can open them in Camera RAW later if I need to make some more changes and I find it easier to this way.  

Now I import all three of these TIFF files into Lightroom CC where I’ll do my magic, in this case I’m using Photomatix Pro 5.0, but it is currently up to version 5.5. You can also run Photomatix in Photoshop, but I prefer to use it in Lightroom.  Photomatix Pro is one of several HDR programs I have loaded on my system and each one will get me different results. If you have this program loaded on your computer, you can go up under the File Menu and choose it from your Plug-ins. 

When I start up Photomatix, it is going to start up and immediately stop. A dialog box will pop open that allows me to set my Pre-processing Options. Check out the image of my settings. I don’t need mine aligned because it’s a single shot, but I do reduce noise and chromatic aberrations.  In the section called Handling of HDR, I check it to automatically re-import into Lightroom for me. Then I check 8 bit in the Output Format menu. When I have these all set, I click Export on the bottom and Photomatix will start up and quickly stop again.

Another dialog box will open to tell me all three images have the same Exposure settings according to the Exif Data. Like I didn’t know that huh? 
  

Fortunately the program allows me to change them manually in this dialog box. I set the one called Over to +1.0, the Neutral one I leave alone and the Dark one I set to -1.0.  Check out the image. When I’m done changing those, I click the OK button. 

Photomatix will re-start and does its thing and when it’s done, a screen will open with a bunch of output choices.  I check out my choices and in this case I like the one called Default so I choose that and then click on Save and Re-Import box.  See Image. Photomatix will then save it as a TIFF in my folder and Lightroom will re-import it for me. When I get it saved I then bring it into Photoshop for my final tweaks.

When I get it into Photoshop, the first thing I do is to duplicate my background layer because I never like to work on my original image. I can see I want to do some patching on the driveway and the street in front of the house. When I’m done my patching, I use the Quick Selection tool to select the whole driveway and sidewalk, then pop it on its own layer and feather the edges a little bit. Then I’ll use the Burn Tool (set at about 25%)  to darken the driveway just a little bit. When I’ve got all my tweaks done, I darken the whole photo a little bit more and add some contrast. Finally I crop it down to a 4 x 6 format and trim off some of the street and then Sharpen it and save it as a PSD file. I then make a JPEG copy of my file in sRGB mode  to deliver to my clients.

There are many ways to do the same thing I’m doing here, this methods just works for me. This whole process only takes less than 10 minutes total, but judging by the final photo, I’m pretty pleased. What do you think?  I hope this little tutorial gives you some ideas for future projects yourself. 

Remember, as always, keep shooting and have some fun!

Tethered Shooting in Lightroom CC

These days, more and more people are shooting tethered. Maybe you’re asking yourself, what is tethered shooting and when or why would I want to shoot tethered?

For myself, I shoot tethered for a few different reasons, but mostly because I want to view my images on my monitor instead of the little LCD on the back of my camera. Plus, I set it up so I can also have my images loaded directly into a folder on the computer instead of filling up a memory card.

Image 1

This can be especially nice if your shooting portraits, because you can view your photos on the large monitor instantly and make sure you’ve got the shot correct immediately and share it with your subject or client right on the spot. A lot of times, the person your shooting will loosen up a little bit if they see what you’re doing and how the shots look.  This could also come in handy if you were working with an art director because they wouldn’t have to stop your session to view images on the cameras LCD screen.  

Sometimes I’ll shoot tethered when I’m home doing some Macro work. I’m a Canon shooter so most of the time when I’m doing Macro I prefer to use Live View with the Canon software because I can make finer adjustments like focusing, on the spot and see them on my laptop screen.

Some of you are already familiar with shooting tethered, and if you’ve done this in previous versions of Lightroom you’ll notice nothing has really changed, sorry.

For this tutorial I’m using my laptop connected to one of my cameras, in this case it’s a Canon Mk II, with a with a 15 foot USB cable. You might also want to secure your cord when tethering with a device called a Jerkstopper, but if you’re careful you shouldn’t have any problems. 

Image 2

To start a shooting tethered, go up under File scroll down to Tethered Capture and select Start Tethered Capture.    (see image 1)

When the Tethered Capture Settings dialog box opens you can customize this (pink boxes) and specify the name of the session, what template to use for incoming file names, where to store them and what metadata and keywords to use. In mine, I called my Session – New Blog Post, in the naming section I used Custom Name – Sequence and Custom Text called Fender Guitar and started numbering them from # 1.  Below that you’ll see I have a folder on my desktop called Tethered shooting as my Destination and I chose not to add any Metadata but put Samples for new Blog Post in the Keywords box.  Easy right?    ( see Image 2 )

When your  settings are all set, click OK to proceed.

This should put you in LR in the Library module and you’ll see the heads up display (HUD) for your tethered session. You’ll notice your camera model up in the top left corner, mine is a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and a big gray button on the other end.   

 ( Image 3 )

Image 3

Note:  If everything is connected but you get an error message “No Camera Detected”, you might need to adjust a settings on your camera. Check out your camera manual if you run into this problem.

On the HUD, you can set default develop setting to apply to your incoming images. Between the Tethered Settings dialog and this option on the HUD, you’ll get many of the same options that you would when importing them from your memory card. (see Image 3)

Now when you shoot you can use the shutter button on your camera (I prefer a cable release) or you can hit the big gray button on the HUD. Sometimes if my camera is on a tripod I’ll just use the gray button.

Now when you shoot, the images get loaded into the folder you chose and instead of previewing the image on the back of your camera, your laptop monitor becomes your LCD.

When you’re all done with your session, go up to File, Tethered Capture, Stop Tethered Capture. You can also just click the little X on the top right of the HUD if you want. You can see that Lightroom created a folder named after our session name called New Blog Post.  ( Image 4)

Basically that’s all there is to it. Your images are now sored in their own folder in your library and all ready for you to work on. I hope some of find this helpful.  Nice huh?­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Rememer, as always, keep shooting and have some fun!

Improved Resizing in the new Photoshop CC

It wasn’t too long ago we used to rely on third-party software programs for really detailed enlargements of our images. Sure, there were ways to do this with just about any version of Photoshop, but sometimes the results were sometimes just so-so or involved too many steps.

For years the standard go-to program was Genuine Fractals from onOne Software, which these days is called Perfect Resize 9.5. That’s still a great program, but with the newest version of Adobe Photoshop CC, our need to strictly use that program has changed.

These days most cameras have plenty of Megapixels, usually somewhere in the 20 Megapixel range, which means you can crop away parts of your images and still have plenty of detail. But sometimes you’ll want to enlarge just a specific area and still keep all the details.  Maybe you’re creating a composite or something and you want to blow it up 200 or 300% or larger?  Another reason might be to enlarge a photo taken with your smart phone or a lower resolution camera.  Whatever the reason, Photoshop CC can help you out. 

This image here was taken with a Canon G15  a 12 MP camera. Times like these are when we usually went to third party software to do this quickly and easily. These days I’m happy with my results right in Photoshop CC.   

Photoshop has had two options for enlarging images in the past, Preserve Details and Bicubic Smoother, but they really didn’t stand up most of the time when you needed to really enlarge your image. These options are still there, but they’ve been totally revamped in Photoshop CC and do an excellent job.  I know a lot of our Photoshop friends these days are really into composites and with the newly improved algorithms inside Photoshop CC, which were designed for optimizing clarity and detail, I think you’ll be surprised. 

The image of Bob the Duck was only shot at ƒ/4.0 and really wasn’t tack sharp to begin with, but it was blown up 500% from the original. What do you think?  You really should try this out for yourself, I think you’ll be impressed.

As always, remember to keep shooting and have some fun.