Hdr Tutorial - Photoshop com plugin Lucis Art - Photomatix - Inglês

HDR Tutorial - Focus on Clouds I hope this tutorial on my evolving HDR techniques proves useful to you!

I have put this together for all my Flickr friends. It’s a fine group of people over there and I have learned a great deal; their creativity, inventiveness, techniques, and dedication have inspired me to try new things and evolve forward. You can see some of this creativity in a special private group I created called the “Brilliant Cabal”, where I am collecting a personal archive of some great stuff from my imaginative comrades.

What is HDR?

HDR is short for High Dynamic Range. It is a software technique of taking either one image or a series of images, combining them, and adjusting the contrast ratios to do things that are virtually impossible with a single aperture and shutter speed.

I created a set called “The Variety of HDR” to show all the different things you can do with HDR. Here are a few examples:

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1. The Arenal Volcanic Plume, 2. The Flowering, 3. Ole Red, the Texan Fire Truck, 4. Help Me, 5. The Beach at Groudle Glen, 6. Texas Girls on a Spring Afternoon, 7. The Rapture, 8. Midnight Obelisk, 9. Soft and Feathery Origami

I’m a huge defender and believer of utilizing HDR as a technique for processing photos because I think it helps to evoke my actual memory of the scene. It’s just another tool that digital photographers can utilize depending on the situation. As opposed to the camera shutter and aperture, the human eye actually scans the scene at a very high rate of speed, constantly adjusting the pupil diameter to adjust the light and color levels. The mind builds a quilt-like image that is comprised of millions of little bits, combined with neuron-connected memories of colors of objects. For example, when you look at a sunset, you can see all the colors of the clouds and sky, but you can also see all the colors of the trees and rocks in the foreground. This is why, many times, people get home after a vacation and sigh at their pictures and tell their friends, “Well, it was much better when you were there.” So hey, it’s 2006, why not use software and the built-in ability of your camera to make a beautiful rendition of what YOU really saw? Some of us see life in HDR and some don’t… There’s a lot of HDR-hatahs out there… just ignore them… or tell them to get back in their dark rooms with their smelly hands.

HDR Tutorial – Focus on Clouds and Layers The first part of the tutorial looks at HDRs from multiple exposures. The second part deals with HDRs from a single RAW file. Both parts will concentrate on my techniques for clouds. I get a lot of Flickr mail from people asking me about these clouds, so I will ensure to focus on these in the tutorial. Here are a few of the HDR cloud pictures… and you can see them all via the “clouds tag”. Some are more “extreme” than others, just depending upon how artsy I felt during my processing.



1. 22 Smokestacks, 2. Forestscream, 3. The Rapture, 4. Clouds over Concrete, 5. Rain Approaching the Town Square, 6. A Dithering Evening, 7. Texas Skies, 8. Columns and Clouds, 9. Jefferson Memorial Just After Midnight

The “cloud” focus in this tutorial is really a detail of layer process. You can use this same technique not just to accentuate clouds, but also petals on a flower, edges on a building, etc.

Part 1 – Multiple Exposure HDR with Focus on Clouds

So here is a picture of my desktop before I launch all of these apps and melt my CPU. Speaking of which, Macs are great, and my Mac’s CPU does not melt, and it handles all this stuff with reckless aplomb. I used to hate Macs and hate Mac people, but I’m a changed man. These things are great… Okay I digressed way to early in this tutorial.



What apps do you need? You can see down there that I have the essentials: Photoshop, Photomatix, and FDRTools (for single RAW HDRS). I also use Aperture… it’s not essential, but I’ve grown attached to this newcomer. I will of course talk more about these apps below.

Here is the starting image… this is the image taken by most cameras in this situation. Notice there are a lot of darks and a lot of brights. It’s kind of interesting… But not nearly as interesting or as eye-splitting as the HDR version, which I put right beneath it. Click on any of these pictures to zoom in and see the larger version. In Flickr, click on “All Sizes” to see the large or original.



Finding good subject matter for HDR is important. Below is a screenshot of Aperture. I find it an excellent way to organize all the photos right off my camera. I especially like how it groups together exposures by time frame, and how those groups are collapsible. There is a little slider bar on import that allows you to change the time between pictures that go into a group.

This tutorial will focus on those three pictures of the grotto. You can see the exposures are all different… in this case +2/0/-2. It was taken on a tripod (essentially essential) in FINE JPEG mode. I switch back and forth between JPEG and RAW depending on the situation. I always use JPEG for multiple exposures, and RAW for single shots… It’s kind of a pain switching back and forth in the D70 menu system, but this is the albatross I wear for you people.

I selected those three pictures and exported the JPEGs to a folder.

From there, open up Photomatix. Just buy it… or get the trial. I know Photoshop has HDR built in – but don’t bother. It’s not nearly as good as Photomatix. As long as you are doing HDR, why not use the best tools avail?



Here you can see that little zoom window below shows the new contrast and coloration for wherever the mouse pointer happens to be. This sort of mimics the human pupil as I mentioned before and is a little preview of what the tone-mapped version will look like. Sorry about those other pics in this screenshot… I am not good at making tutorials.

In Photomatix, go to HDRI > Generate HDR. Inside that dialog, choose the multiple exposures… In this case I chose the three JPGs I just exported. After that, choose the defaults until it generates the HDR picture. If you did not use a tripod (tsk tsk), then use that checkbox on the 3rd dialog to “Align Images”. It will do a half-way decent job, but not nearly as optimal as a tripod.

After that, go to HDRI > Tone Mapping. This will open up a fun dialog box with all sorts of sliders and buttons to play with. There is no “magic” selection in here. It totally depends on the picture.

There are a few rules of thumb that I have discovered, however:

If you take the luminosity below 0, you will get a halo-effect. It can sometimes look cool, but



it usually makes the picture look fake or cobbled together. If you set the smoothing to anything other than “high” you get some very strange coloration and embossing effects that no longer look natural. You can do some VERY artistic things with different smoothing settings, but they rarely look realistic. The color saturation should be set a little lower than you think. The final version always comes out 10-20% more saturated than the preview for some reason. High luminosity causes noise. But don’t worry about that… I’ll show you how to get rid of that.

Below, you can see what it looks like when you go too crazy on the settings. It’s very outlandish and kooky, and kinda cool, but you don’t really want to ruin the picture like that.

The next version shows settings that are just about right. In truth, I set the saturation too high… It came out a little too colorful.



After you tone map, save the image as a JPEG and then load up sweet lady Photoshop. What, you’re not good at Photoshop? It just takes some practice… there are so many good tutorials on the web. Just practice 30 mins a day or so and learn different tools… It’s fun.

Okay see all those black dots around the image? Those are bats! Yes this place, Hamilton Pool, is one of the best kept secrets in Austin. The preserve’s pool and grotto were formed when the dome of an underground river collapsed thousands of years ago. There is a ring of 45-foot waterfalls all around the rim. Flow was light this day, but you can still see a few streams of water coming down.

Even though the bats are cool, they look like dirt, so I went in with the Clone Tool and got rid of them. Except for one. There was one large and perfectly formed bat in the upper right that I kept.



Next, I duplicated the background twice. Here is a high-level description of what I am gonna do:

Bottom layer: Super-detailed clouds Middle layer: Current picture with nice details Top Layer: Trees will be sculpted and made…more… dreamy.

Then we will poke holes in the upper layers at various levels of opacity to see through to the bottom layers. Please note that not all pictures get this treatment… it totally depends on the picture. In this one, it is great because it has some clouds that need some detail, it has trees that need less detail, and it has people/water than need average detail.

There are TWO ways to give details to the clouds. One is free using “FILTER > OTHER > HIGH PASS” and the other is sweet lady LucisArt. I prefer the second because it is faster and better, but here is the free way to do it.

Cloud detail method 1: High Pass

Here I will paste a bunch of pics here. This is what I did. Select the top layer. FILTER > OTHER > HIGH PASS. Adjust the slider bar so you can barely see the edges. Hit okay, then change that layer mode to OVERLAY. That is the dropdown over there in the layers panel. Note that it sharpens all the edges of the entire picture, including the clouds. That probably is not enough, so select that layer and dupe it (apple-J) multiple times until you get some tasty contrast and details in the clouds. You will notice the rest of your picture starts to look crazy… But after you are done, then put the original background version on the top layer and “erase” through it to get to your detailed clouds. You will see that I Gaussian Blurred the middle layer as well to smooth out all the noise in the sky. Again, I strategically erased to make the proper sky layer come forward.



Cloud detail method 2: LucisArt (preferred)

LucisArt is awesome. I am sure after you see this you will want to get it. I suggest you download the trial and give it a run… the trial is nice because you get a preview window that shows what all the cool sliders do. I talked to the LucisArt people so I could give a coupon code to you all, but I was shut down hard. Sorry, I tried… but buy it anyway, even though their webpage is rather JeffK. I don’t know how such a cool art-related product has such a 1998 webpage, but I digress again. Select the bottom layer and turn the others off. Go to Filter > LucisArt and adjust the settings to… hmmm… well it depends on the clouds. Every cloud is different.. I’ve really been learning my clouds. The settings for cumulonimbus are different than cirrus are different than mammatus are different than altocirrus, etc.

The two best filters in LucisArt are sculpture and exposure. In this case, I chose sculpture and put the top slider around 3. The lower the number, the more details you get. That second radio button seems to be some kind of strange embossing level. The bottom slider adjusts the mix level, how extreme it mixes with the original. There is no magic setting, as I said… just play around with it.



You will notice extra noise as well… don’t worry about that now. We’ll Gaussian Blur that out later…

Now I turned on the second layer. I used the selection box and cut a hole in it so you can see through to the nice cloud details. On this level, you will want to go ahead and poke holes by erasing all the clouds so you can see the detailed clouds from below. You may want to come back to the middle layer later (if you are even using this middle layer technique), and do some more erasing if you like the details more on the bottom layer.

Okay now let’s work on the top layer. This is where we are going to make the trees look much better. The trees are already good, yes? But they can look better… Sometimes detailed trees are good, but sometimes they look better if some of the sharp details are decreased. It’s not exactly blurring, but “sculpting” is maybe a better word. So bring up LucisArt again and slide the top bar up above 25 somewhere. It is impossible to know beforehand the proper setting. Sometimes it’s 25, sometimes it’s 37, 43, you just have to play with it. The mix is also variable. I think in this case I did around 30 or so.

In the picture below, you can see I cutaway half the picture so you can see the effect (I did the undo after the screenshot). You have to zoom into the original size to see this effect. The left side has the high sculpt setting and the trees look better (to me) than the super-detailed trees on the right. I won’t get into my philosophies on photography, but too many details in a picture distract the eye.



In the next screenie, you can see that I am on the top layer and using the eraser at 90% to erase the clouds… When I re-activate the bottom layers, the clouds will come through with nice details.

Then in the next picture you can see the selection all around the outside. It was feathered to about 40 for fading purposes… I then erased it at around 60% opacity to see some of the brighter details of the lower levels. Again… this was particular to this specific picture.



Aha okay now the final step. This should always be a step for people that HDR skies. Luminosity increases in the tone mapping normally create noise. Noise is fine in most places and hardly noticeable except in the sky. So choose the Magic Wand Selector and keep adjusting the Tolerance until you have SHIFT-clicked all the blue sky. Feather it by 2 or 3 and then choose FILTER > BLUR > GAUSSIAN BLUR. Put that slider on 2.5 or so….whatever looks smooth.

Then…tada – you are done. That is an hour of your life you will never get back, but let’s hope you formed some good memories and skills to create more. ☺



Part 2 – Single RAW

For this method, you have to use FDRTools. Thanks to /ltus for pointing me to this tool.

FDRTools has a horrible UI that must have been designed by a German minimalist with a sense of humor. Using this tool is just not easy. Also, I don’t know even how to properly install it, and I’m a pretty smart guy when it comes to that sort of thing. I have to run it in “install” mode, which means I have to be installing it every time I run it. It’s horribly confusing and I hope I can describe how to use this dang thing. When it comes to turning a RAW into an HDR, it’s the only game in town from what I can tell.

FDRTools also has a very unusual trial version. It seems to work fine until you process your picture, but then you see all kinds of strange patchy lines. This is actually their watermark, but it makes you think their software is buggy. Again, I don’t know why they chose a watermark that makes their software look buggy, but I am not in charge over there.

Okay so here we are back in Aperture. You can see I have a few RAW pictures here. One key to have a good HDR candidate is that there is a lot of contrast and that it is very sharp. Although, the picture I selected here doesn’t really have a lot of contrast, I chose it to add contrast to the clouds behind the jet.

This picture below shows the cool Loop tool in aperture that lets you quickly zoom in on the details of whatever pictures you put up on the lightboard. That kid has a lot of hair… It’s not fair.



BTW, does anyone know how to export a RAW from Aperture? I have no clue… I keep another copy of the RAW on my drive for the next step…

Open up FDRGui, whose name flows off the tongue as easily as the mouse fumbles across its menu system.

Go to IMAGES > ADD and then go find your RAW picture. A second dialog will appear with a big version of your photo. Go to the Tone Mapping dropdown and choose “non- pure HDR”. Then go back to the other dialog and choose IMAGES > EXPOSE. Then a Java 0.1 window opens up… under no circumstances should you try typing in that window. Each keystroke takes an administration to appear. Click “Browse” and type in the name of the destination file. If you just type something like “plane”, it will generate a plane.hdr. Then click RUN… and you will get a little console window that appears and creates the HDR file.



Open up that HDR in Photomatix and do the same sort of thing I described one light year above this paragraph.

Take the resulting JPEG into Photoshop and then use LucisArt on two different layers to make the clouds look more interesting. In the following two pictures, you see the details on the bottom layer and the large sculpting on the top layer. I adjusted the opacity on the top layer a bit and then went through with the eraser to bring out the details on the bottom layer. The top area was very noisy, so it was selected and Gaussian Blurred until it was interesting.



There was also some noise in the clouds themselves, so I went around with the Blur tool and rubbed them smooth.

And then we have the final version. This picture is also interesting if I crop closer around the plane and cut out some of the dark corners and edges (HDR often really makes the edges of a picture strange), but in this one, I like the strange darkness in the clouds.



Okay that is it… Hope you enjoyed the tutorial… best of luck to you.

tags:cabal Flickr hdr lucisart photomatix tutorial

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at 10:34 am and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “HDR Tutorial - Focus on Clouds”

1. Eric Baxter June 6th, 2006 12:48 1

Hey. Nice webpage and HDR tutorial. I’m working on puting together a new travel site to replace the mess of a site that’s been taking up webspace for the last several years. Keep up the great HDRs on flickr, and thanks for the briliant group of yours and your comments. Eric (worldwidewandering on flickr)

2. davey June 6th, 2006 13:43 2

great tutorial, thanks. have ben a fan of your shots for some time now, and had problems with setting photomatix’s tonemapping but these settings work great, thanks a lot.

3. Dennis 'Syo Belleza June 6th, 2006 15:54 3

thanks for the tutorial, bro this means a lot to us, yah know. man, i can’t thank you enough for sharing your creations and tips to us.



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Hdr Tutorial - Photoshop com plugin Lucis Art - Photomatix - Inglês

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