DIY HDR

[keithlard]

Comments

[tomatorama]

Oh! I like this effect! I had forgotten it existed but now I want to look into it more. I'd be interested to see the differently exposed pictures you used to make it. Also I went Flickr-snooping and must say I'm awfully impressed with this, I can never photograph sky colours properly like this, OMG the colours.

[keithlard]

HDR! Have you forgotten how good it tastes? :D

Here are the source frames:

[keithlard]

Oh one thing about that sky picture, it is taken with my new circular polariser which is great for dramatic skies as it cuts through haze and increases saturation and contrast. It is not super expensive either as it is only about twice the price of a regular skylight filter and you can do a lot more with it.

[brantcoffee]

Britpop Says: November 14th, at PM oh my god. This is just amazing. I can’t believe SL looks that way now.

[zandperl]

Can you explain what step 4 means? Like, what does that step actually *do*? I've been wanting to try this, and I have some good flower photos I want to use for it, but I don't get how to do it yet.

[keithlard]

Well, you could create the layer mask yourself by just painting black over the areas you want to make transparent. But for the dark frame layer mask, those areas are already black in the image! So you just use the image itself as its own layer mask.

For the bright frame it needs to be inverted, of course, because it is the bright areas that you want to show through. I found this tutorial which has some nice example images that show what's going on.

[flexagon]

That's really neat; there's something so subtly surreal about the final photograph, as if it's just bathed everywhere with spooky universe-light.

[keithlard]

It's weird, isn't it. I'm quite looking forward to trying it out with some night photos as the surreal effect should be much more pronounced.

But it only seems odd because we're used to looking at low dynamic range photos. If you think about it, life is in HDR!