There's No Place Like Home

This is one of the earlier images I posted on G+, a Winter sunrise reflection at Topaz Lake on the California/Nevada border.  Shooting into the sun like this can involve a greater range of light than a digital sensor can handle, so I used Photomatix HDR software to recover lost detail in the darkest shadows and the brightest highlights.  I've been using Photomatix HDR software for 7 years or so now, and it got a bad reputation earl on for being strange results which were relatively difficult to control.  

A lot of the challenges with HDR have been resolved by two big changes:
1. In the past you picked an HDR processing method, then waited a while to see how it turned out.  Recent versions of the software show you 32 different methods so you can select the one which best suits your goals instead of picking one blind.
2. The latest versions have interfaces to Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, so you can pre-process an image first (adjust white balance and reduce noise for example), then select and move the desired exposures into Photmatix, then after you process the image, a TIFF file is brought back into your editing program such as Lightroom for more fine tuning.  You have far more control over your results with this sort of workflow, adding a little pre and post processing in a competent image editing program.

I don't take the extra time and effort to use HDR software on a high percentage of my shots, but many of our most dramatic photographic opportunities come with extreme lighting situations like this, and if I can produce better results even 5 to 10% of the time, and in exactly the most challenging and stunning lighting conditions, the $99 or so it takes to deliver hundreds more images to my portfolio is well worth the price.  

One of the amazing things about HDRsoft, the company which produces Photomatix, is that they've upgraded me across all new versions for all these years, so it has cost me only about $15/year.  They updated their licensing a few years back and I thought my free upgrades were done when my original license code would no longer work, but I contacted HDRsoft and they said "no problem" and issued me a new license key.  Now that's customer service!

I've written a lot of articles on HDR on my blog over the years.  Here's one discussing what you can do to handle some of the more challenging situations:
Tame HDR to Produce More Realistic Images
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2007/09/tame-hdr-to-enhance-dynamic-range.html

And more:
http://activesole.blogspot.com/search?q=HDR

These days people sometimes ask me, "Is that HDR?"  The latest HDR processing and the Lightroom – Photomatix – Lightroom workflow has gotten good enough that I often can't tell unless I go look at the file name.  For me, that's a measure of my success.  Photos have a subject, some reason the photo was taken, and if the processing gets in the way and distracts my viewers, they're off on a tangent and I've failed to communicate what it was which caused me to capture that subject in the first place.  The story of that subject becomes a murder mystery instead… who killed sunrise?  While there's no one "right" approach to how to process images, even Ansel Adams often re-worked a particular image over the years, at least with the latest HDR tools integrated with powerful editing programs, you'll have the control to influence the result, instead of having the tool impose a distracting stamp of process-driven sameness on the outcome.

Winter sunrise reflection on Topaz Lake, in the Eastern Sierra Nevada on the California/Nevada border.

Google+: Reshared 115 times
Google+: View post on Google+