HDR vs. 1 File

Heute gibt es mal was auf Englisch.

Ich verfolge schon seit langer Zeit den Blog www.cameraporn.net (keine Angst…ich habe stundenlang vergeblich nach etwas anzüglichem geschaut und nichts gefunden!! Es ist ein Kamera-Blog). Dort gab es eine Aktion zum Bilder bearbeiten, die ich genutzt habe, um mal zu zeigen was die sieben goldenen Regeln von Scott Kelby können! Hier der Bericht:

Why HDR if you have a book and a RAW File

That´s an awesome looking HDR you might think, but you´re way off.

Lately it´s all about high dynamic range and more flexibility that tons of different programs are able to give you. A good program is supposed to have a hundred sliders that allow you to control your settings in every segment of the composite image you created out of three, five or even seven pictures. But, what for? The only things you need is a RAW-File out of your camera and Scott Kelby´s Book „The seven point system“.

Ok…I (kinda) lied. You also need Photoshop CS3. That´s it, though. Photoshop comes with everything you need to optimize your images.

I want to give you a quick introduction to Scott´s amazing book. I have never read a photoshop book that gave me such a lot of information and at the same time was so memorable and intuitive.

If you read this article, you´ll get to know a bit about Scott´s System and how it works, but it will NOT replace to read it.This are only a couple of many techniques Kelby presents.

Now, let´s start:

The first thing I did, was to open the file in Camera Raw. I developed the images just like you see underneath. That looks scary at first, but you´ll understand in a couple of minutes. I then clicked on Open Object, which opens the image as a smart object. Don´t worry if you can´t find the button in your Camera Raw. Press and hold Shift and you´ll see that the button „open image“ changes to „open object“.


What now? The image looks way too orange and the rocks are almost black. At this point the original looked a lot better. But here´s the trick:

With smart objects you´re always able to go back to Camera Raw and change your settings by simply double click on the thumbnail in the layers palette (Wait, don´t go back and reset all your changes you might have made, if you follow this article).

In the next step I created a copy of the Layer by Control klicking on the layer and choose new smart object via copy.

This creates a copy of your Layer, but puts it as new smart object. Then i double clicked on the new created layer to go back to camera raw. I changed the settings to what you see underneath and pressed „ok“ to go back to Photoshop.

And here´s the second trick:
I went ahead and used layer masks (I hope you all know how layer masks work, because I´m not going to explain how they work here) to reveal the sky of the underlying layer and at the same time, keep the properly developed oil barrels, rocks and water.

But at that time I didn´t like the water too much, so I created another Smart Object and again developed it. When I felt satisfied with the water I created another layer mask to only reveal the parts of the water I like.

This is how I like post processing, because it´s still the „one“ picture you are working with and not a composite of three or more images.

Usually at this point you are done with combining different exposures to one good and realistic looking picture. Now it´s time to improve contrast, detail and shadows.

I started off by creating a new Curves Adjustment Layer to set the white balance by clicking on the white, gray and black eyedroppers on the bottom of the window and find a spot in the image that´s supposed to be white, gray and black.

In addition to that I created another Curves Adjustment Layer to give the whole picture a little color boost. I went through every channel (Red, Green and Blue) and increase the slope like you see underneath.

Then I copied the adjustment layer, set the blend mode to saturation and changed the first curves´ blend mode to soft light.

At this point I liked the way the picture looked, but wanted to give it the last little tweaks.

In order to increase the saturation of the overall image, I changed my color mode from RGB to LAB and used Dan Margulis´ Man From Mars Move, which is explained here (http://www.peachpit.com/podcasts/channel.aspx?c=0dfc29b9-244f-44cd-83f2-7cb51b90037f)

Back in RGB I flattened the image, copied the flattened layer and set it to screen mode. I added a layer mask and only revealed highlights in the water and in the sky.

Then i straightened the image, cropped it and gave it a little border around it! Done.

I know this is complicated and not very much understandable for most not (and little) Photoshop users. And I also know, that if Scott Kelby reads this, he will not fully recognize his system in what I´ve done.
I only want to show, that you don´t need to take three pictures or be mad at yourself, because you forgot to. One single image is enough to get beautiful results. I hope you liked it!