Lately I've been experimenting with taking High Dynamic Range imaging, although their not suitable for every occasion, they do bring more depth, reality and you can be little bit more creative.
HDR is simply a multiple images captured in different exposure often using 'exposure bracketing', usually 3, but can be 4, 5 or 6 images with exposure value (EV) differences (known as stops) and then later merging them into a single HDR image using specialized software.
Then I simply adding some colour to make it more interesting.
How did I do it?
I tried out different software before settling with Photomatix, including Adobe Lightroom which did a terrible job compared to this.
First off you browse or drag and drop your images with different exposures.
Here you can select the images you want to use, perhaps you want to use 3 images instead of 5 or 6.
This option is great to use, the alignment is very precise even with hand held images, but use according to your situation.
Here I marked a ghost in the image, simply put because the images are stacked together and there was a moving object, it looks blurry, however there is a way to remove it.
We move the deghosting slider all the way to 100, it's a little bit better then the previous image but still blurry, why? because the image was captured using slower shutter speed.
I select the middle image and that fixed the shutter speed blur. I could have selected the top image with high shutter speed but I noticed there is more noise and quality goes down, so you have to compromise somewhere.
Once satisfied with the deghosting you can use the 24 different presets on the right or you can manually move the sliders on the left to archive the desired HDR effect and then save it as a personal preset.
And that's it, it's really that easy and gives such a nice effect so give it a try :D
Canon 30D
Lightroom
Photomatix
