HDR

Yesterday I went to Big Sur and took a whole bunch of photos of the scenery etc. which I intended to use to make my very first HDR image. I used auto-bracketing (AEB) to get a total of 9 exposures for whichever picture/scene I wanted to turn into a HDR photo. When I got home I  did some work on photoshop to merge the photos into a HDR image. After the final product came out (took a long time as I was working with 9 RAW images each about 50MB each), I was disappointed. This did not look at all like the surreal HDR images I had seen in the past-what gives? So, I did a little research and found that Photoshop CS3 (or PS CS2 and onward) only merges the photos together, what creates the cool effects is something called "tone-mapping." To have your image tone-mapped, you need to get some software, like Photomatix. I downloaded the free trial of Photomatix, just to see how it would work, and lo and behold the photo was much better. However, since I was using the free-trial, the image had  water-marks all over it.  I tried another program I found called "Essential HDR Community." The problem with that software is that it only lets you output files that are 1MB in size-that's their "Free-trial catch." It also puts a watermark but it is on the very bottom corner and easy to crop out. So, I'm still on the journey to find a very good software to tone-map my images in.  Once I do find a good software (hopefully) I will upload my newly created HDR images to my blog.

Tone mapping, just by the way, is also another thing I need to learn. Just to see how it looks I was using the default settings, but I intend to learn more about manually tone-mapping an image so I can customize it myself. 

On another note, Big Sur is absolutely breathtaking.