These are some shots that I got the other day. While this doesn't have the extreme sharpening that some HDR images have, it still is HDR. For those who don't know anything about HDR, it stands for High Dynamic Range. Which in a nutshell pretty much means that the entire photo is exposed properly.This is my original image.
Nothing too great about this photo. The sky is over-exposed and the ground is under-exposed. We need to change it so that everything is exposed how I want it.
So here's how to do it:
1: First, open up photoshop, (I have elements 10) and load in your photo you want to use. Make sure you shoot in RAW or this method will not work. If you shoot in JPEG you do not have the control you need to convert photos into HDR. (Always shoot in RAW!)
You should come up with a screen similar to this when you open your photo.
Ingnore all of the settings for now and click on the open image box in the bottom right.
2: Okay, so now go back to wherever you have the image saved and make four more copies of the photo, renaming each one something different. This is just to get past that photoshop won't reopen a photo that has the same name as another one.
3: Open one of the copies of the photo in photoshop. You should get an identical screen to the one you had before, but instead of just opening the photo, slide the Exposure slider to -1.00 (as higlighted in yellow.)
4: Open the image and repeat 3 more times with exposures of -2, +1, and +2.
5: You should now have a screen that looks something like this.
6: Now select all of the images (ctrl. click on PC and Command click on MAC) and go to file>New>Photomerge Exposure.
In this case I pulled down the Highlight Details and Shadows all the way to 0 but it is really up to what looks good. Click done and wait for the merge to finish. Once it is done you should have 6 photos now. You can delete all but the photo you just made. And you're pretty much done! of course this isn't a recipe for always getting a great shot but hopefully this will help you on your way to getting good HDR photos!
Good Luck!
