HDR is Really Cool

I heard Scott Bourne talking on TWIP about HDR. I had heard about Photomatix before on Digg but did not see how it could be relevant form my novice skills. After listening to Scott’s podcast I decided to try it out for myself. I tried with and without a tripod. I set my AEB to 2 F-Stops. Without a tripod I would just hold down the trigger for three frames. With the tripod I would press the remote button once and it would take all three pictures as fast as it could.

The picture above is the result after processing all three pictures and generating the tonal map. The picture is still watermarked by Photomatix until I decide which version to use. I also tried Bracketeer as also suggested in the podcast. I’m still trying to get the whole tonal maps thing to work in the latter.

The pictures below are the original three pictures taken 2 F-Stops apart. Below them is the merged HDR image from Photoshop’s automation script. The magic happens in the last step with the tonal map.

I took about 500 pictures yesterday. About 20 of them are destined to become HDR images. I will probably post several of those to my Flickr account as I go through them.
HDR sample images