HDR Merging & Tweaking Tutorial

Pre-requisite – get Photomatix. You need it in order to proceed with this seciton :) but be warned that if your HDR is larger than 640*480, the free trial verison will embed a watermark across it.

Step 1: Open Photomatix and Generate HDR

You do not need to pre-load the photos when you open Photomatix. It’s nice enough to let you select after you’ve chosen to generate your HDR. Access HDR > Generate or press Ctrl+G. A popup window will open and ask you to select the photos you would want to merge, as shown below:

Step 2: Load Images

Select the photos you want (since you’re selecting multiple files, hold Shift when selecting). Click OK when you’re done.

Step 3: HDR Merge Settings

A window with a few settings will appear after you’ve confirmed what photos you want to load.

By default, Align Source Images option is already selected, so as the Take tone curve of colour profile option. Well for most of the time I will stick to the default settings. The alignment of source images is crucial because even shooting using a stable tripod will produce photos that are slightly (on a very infinitesimally insignificant scale) different in terms of perspective and angle. For the Attempt to reduce ghosting artifacts option, it is by default, unchecked. Unless you have subjects very upclose, do not choose this option. If you have a landscape shot, the background objects do change but they’re too small to be seen (even smaller after you shrink the images to fit your screen resolution or blog container).

Sometimes when Photomatix is unable to determine the exposure compensation of your photos (surprisingly it doesn’t look at the EXIF data but visually detects EV by itself), it’ll give you the option to manually enter the exposure compensation of each photo.

Click OK to proceed.

Step 4: Here’s your HDR!

After allowing Photomatix to align and combine your images (which takes just a couple of seconds, it’s fast!), you’ll get a preview of your 32-bit HDR image. Don’t be disappointed with the HDR you see now, which has horribly high contrast and details are either all white-washed or blacked-out. A small HDR Viewer window will open as you hover your cursor over the HDR, and you’ll see the predicted / approximate results in it. The preview is not 100% accurate as post-processing by the programme itself is not done yet. The image is not final so don’t panic (the first time I used it, I really did restart Photomatix because I thought it was some software error).

Step 5: Tone Mapping

After you’re satisfied looking at the preview, go to HDR > Tone Mapping or hit Ctrl+T to allow further processing. A tone-mapping window will open where you are presented with a whole lot of adjustment options. Click on the screenshot to view the larger version (due to space contraints, the screenshot below is not complete):

Here are the recommended options:

1. Change the Output Depth from 8-bit to 16-bit. This is because 16-bit image contains more details than its 8-bit counterpart and thus preventing further manipulation in Photoshop from losing too much details.
2. Set the Saturation to 50 (which means the default colour saturation of the HDR). I would rather adjust that in Photoshop, but it’s up to you.
3. For Light Smoothing, try not to venture beyond the last 2 options, because the first few ones produce VERY botchy results (and you’ll most probably hate it).
4. Stick to Details Enchancer. This is because Tone Compressor ignores local contrast and only tries to deal with global contrast. By using tone compressor, what you’ll get is a HDR that no longer looks like a HDR, which I believe you don’t want.
5. For other options, like Tone, Colour, Micro, S/H, feel free to explore, but not Gamma, unless you know what you’re doing :razz:

Step 6: Final Result and Save

And after applying all the little tweaks and adjustments, you’ll be given the final result of your HDR! Click on screenshot to view the larger version.

When you’re done admiring your beautiful HDR, it’s time to save it! Since your HDR is in 16-bit mode, save it in TIFF format – a lossless image format, thus the details stays there and nothing is lost. The HDR is usually saved in the folder where you’ve loaded your photos from.

Step 7: Photoshop Manipulation

I’ve refused to tweak the saturation of the HDR in Photomatix because we have Photoshop to help us out! Open (or you can drag) your HDR into Photoshop. For this image, I’ve increased the saturation and contrast, sharpened the image a little, and lastly applied lens correction to straighten the image.

If you intend to apply filters or to save your image into a JPEG file, remember to convert it to the widely-used 8-bit format! As far as I know, most of Photoshop’s filter do not work in 16-bit images, so do keep that in mind. To convert, go to Mode > 8 Bits/Channel. And you’re done (remember to save!).

And here’s the final image:

A very big difference from the original Photomatix version, right? Well basically for this section, we’ve used Photomatix to merge all the photos into one single HDR, and proceed to use Photoshop to get the minor tweaks done :D it’s as easy as that!

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