.FLYINGHEAD EXPLORING PHOTOSHOP
.TITLE Photoshop CS5’s great new high dynamic range imaging features
.AUTHOR Scott Koegler
.SUMMARY Our eyes can see a much higher range of highlights and shadows than photos can capture and display.
.TIP
Photoshop CS5 is chock-full of great new features. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring five of our favorites. Here’s the fourth one, Photoshop CS5’s great new high dynamic range imaging features:
.H1 Great feature #4: HDR Pro and HDR Toning
One of my favorite photo manipulation toys is HDR, or high dynamic range, imaging. There’s a long explanation for this, but the results are that your photos can better represent the extremely wide range of tones your eyes see.
Our eyes can see a much higher range of highlights and shadows than photos can capture and display. That’s why there are such areas of dark and light in our photos that don’t show any detail. HDR allows us to capture and display these ranges. It’s a trick, really, but it’s effective, and becoming very popular.
Photoshop has had a HDR function in previous versions, but it’s been dismissed as not good enough to use. Instead, programs like Photomatix Pro have been used to merge three or more photos taken at different EV values into a single HDR image.
I’ve tried PS CS5’s HDR function, and have found that it does a pretty good job — certainly better than it did in previous versions. There are a couple things I especially like about it.
The fact that Photoshop’s HDR function is part of Photoshop makes it easier than using a plugin (for me at least). I selected three images that were shot at -1ev, 0ev, and +1ev (not a large range for an HDR set that can span +-5ev in 7 shots).
Photoshop did a nice job of aligning my images, then allowed me to remove any ghosting. For this set of shots, removing ghosting was a necessity because I was taking pictures of flowers, and the wind was blowing. I was able to select which of the three images to use for the non-ghosted image, as shown in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A Choose one image as your non-ghosted image.
The controls for setting the HDR range, shown in Figure B, seem sparse at first, but in my experimentation I found there is plenty of flexibility in setting the range of the controls to produce what I’d call "professional HDR".
.FIGPAIR B You can tweak a lot of basic settings.
I make that distinction because there’s HDR, then there’s HDR!! If you want to go to the extreme versions of HDR that are more surrealistic than realistic, you will need to make extreme use of Photoshop’s HDR controls. But for folks interested in producing more normally-toned high dynamic range images, Photoshop’s version does a good job while using fewer controls than I’ve used in other HDR applications.
Take a look at Figure C to see what HDR can do for you.
.FIGPAIR C Ask not what HDR can do, ask what HDR can do for you.
Next week: lens correction.
.BIO Scott Koegler explores digital products and writes about them from his home in the foothills of North Carolina, and from his camper (as long as he has an internet connection. He has acted as CIO, editor, publisher, photographer, and wine taster, and enjoyed each role.
