Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Matt Suess, and I want to welcome you to this introductory video on HDR photography. I've been a professional photographer now for over 26 years, and I specialize in digital imaging. What I'm going to share with you today is some tips and tricks on using what I think is one of the best HDR software programs out there, and it's Aurora HDR Pro and it's from MacPhun. Photography is all about sharing with your own personal vision. I'm going to talk about that a little bit in this of course. I'm going to show you how to go out and photograph the scene. There's certain ways that we have to photograph it to make sure we're getting the whole tonal range from the darkest darks to the brightest brights. Then, I'm going to show you in the computer how to put that all together. So, you might be asking, "Who is this class for? HDR, it sounds all technical and real high-end, I don't know if I can do this." Yet, this class is designed for beginners and even if you're a little bit more familiar with HDR, I know you'll get some benefit out of it, too, seeing how I work with photos. I'm going to explain things in layman's terms and make it really easy for you to understand, and you're going to be processing your own photos in no time with this. It's about expressing yourself as an artist. Photography is about art. It's just like painting is, just like any other art form. Don't be too alarmed about the tricky stuff, I'm going to make it real easy for you to understand, and we'll get through that together. All right, that's enough of me talking. I know you want to get out here and start watching how this is going to all come together, so why don't you join me and we're going to take a walk around this ghost town and we're going to find some really cool things to photograph. I'm going to explain what I'm doing with the camera, with the histogram, with the exposures, and really get you on track to then being able to do your own HDR photographs. Hey, let's go take some photos.
2. What is HDR Photography?: So, what is HDR photography? It stands for High Dynamic Range and it is a technique that we use out in the field photograph and to overcome the limitations of our camera sensors. Cameras are really great these days, but they still cannot capture the full tonal range that the human eye can see. When we're looking, our eyes are doing all this automatic white balancing and total corrections. We look inside a building, looking outside, and we can see all the detail inside the building and we can still see the detail outside the building too, even though there's a huge brightness difference. It's dark inside and bright outside. Our eyes can see all that at once, but the camera can't. You traditionally had to pick. Do you want to get a proper exposure on the real bright areas, or do you want to see all the detail in the shadow areas? And then if you do, you're going to blow out all the highlights. So, HDR photography, we end up taking multiple exposures. We're shooting it, so that we have an exposure for the highlights and that looks great when we have an exposure for the shadows and that looks great. Then we blend those together using specialized software. In this class, we're going to be using Aurora HDR Pro, which is the best software out there right now for doing HDR photography. Now for some photographers, HDR photography is this big huge bad thing and they don't like it. It looks too unrealistic, it's too much detail, there's too much this, there's too much that. I can see somewhat of a point at a certain end, I mean there are things that you'd really don't want to have in your HDR photographs. That's like really big halos and you can take the detail a little bit too far. But at the same time, photography is about your own personal vision as a photographer, as an artist. Now, in terms of post-processing with HDR photography, me personally, I like my landscape photos to look a little bit more natural. So, I won't push the limit as much in HDR with my landscape photos, but where we're going to be photographing today, it's all man made. We're going to be photographing old cars, and all this texture, and everything like that. For me personally, I think that's where you can have a little bit more of an artistic freedom in bringing out more detail and habit. It maybe be a little bit more gritty and having it be a little bit more of an expression of yourself. We're going to be seeing it in practice here with vintage Americano old cars and trucks. You can use this for interior shots. I know a lot of real estate photographers that use HDR photography so that they can photograph the interior of the building. You can see through the windows and see the nice golf course that's out in the background there, all in that one exposure. It's not as ideal with people photography, but if you do have people in your photos, the cool thing about HDR, with Aurora HDR, is that you can work in layers. You can paint out that effects, you can have a nice HDR background and paint out the effect on the person. You don't really use HDR too much on people because usually you're not trying to bring out all the wrinkles and all the grittiness on a person. Feel free to use these techniques that you're learning in this class with any type of photography that you do. It's all about self-expression with your photographs. I mean. You go out and you photograph something because you like it. So, in my post-processing, that is where the artist and the individual comes out. In my processing, I may have a little bit more saturation and contrast than what you do. You may prefer things that are a little bit more muted. There's no right or wrong. It's all about personal expression and what you want to share with the audience. It's just one of many different tools and techniques that we can use to get a nice photo. There's no right or wrong. Let's just go out and have fun and take some cool pictures.
3. Camera Setup: All right. So, we're about ready to start taking photographs but before we do there's a couple of things that we got to do to our camera to set it up for HDR photography. First thing, put it in manual mode. In addition to having the camera in manual mode, we're going to want to have our white balance not be in an automatic mode either. When you're doing your bracketed photos, you're going to have three different photos and I've seen occasionally the camera have a different white balance on all three of those exposures. So, you don't want to have it set to auto white balance. We're outside right now. It's a daylight, so I'm going to set my white balance in the camera to daylight. That means that each one of those bracketed photos, it's going to have that exact same color temperature throughout all of them. In terms of the f-stop, you're going to want to set an f-stop based on your scene and how much depth of field that you want to have in it. You're going to have obviously a lot more depth of field that f-16 than you would a f-2.8. I'm going to be using an f-stop of anywhere from f-13 to f-16 so, I'm going to have a lot of depth of field in my photographs. The other thing is too you don't want to have it on any auto ISO. Speaking about ISO, you want to have it set for as low of an ISO as possible. HDR by its nature brings out all that texture and detail that we want in the photograph. With a higher ISO, you're going to have a lot of noise in there and HDR is going to really make that noise stand out. So, you want to shoot 100, 200 as low as you possibly can. Now that we have our camera setup in manual mode, our white balance is set up in daylight and we have a good f-stop, we're going to now bring our cameras to our tripod and we're going to connect it to a cable release. This is the ideal setup for HDR photography, a nice sturdy tripod, a cable release. If you don't have a cable release, try setting your camera on self timer and then it'll count down and then it'll take the picture. You don't want to have your hands on the camera pushing the shutter button because you can end up moving the camera a little bit and you want to have all three of your exposures where there's no movement in the camera between all three of them to help it align. Now in Aurora HDR, there is a way to do an alignment so that if you do have a little bit of a movement in there between photos or if you handhold it, Aurora can try and get those all together lined up but make your life easier and just start out with keeping it on a tripod and using a cable release. Okay, so now that I've got my camera on the tripod and I got the cable release set, I am now going to photograph this scene over here and this scene in particular lends itself really well to HDR photography. We have this truck in the foreground here that's in shadow from the trees, the truck behind it's in the sun and we got a tree up in the sun and the blue sky. Normally with the camera, you take an exposure like this, if your exposure is balanced for the orange truck, this truck in the foreground is going to come out really dark or if we expose for this foreground truck, everything out in the background is going to come out overexposed. So, what I'm going to do is the way I do my HDR photography is my middle exposure is what you would sort of be your normal average exposure. What you want to do is make sure that your camera is set up to give you those little flashing and see little lines that pop up on your camera that tell you that your overexposing certain areas. I set up when I'm shooting to make sure that if I have just a little bit of flashing that's okay that is then going to be a proper exposure, it's going to be my middle exposure and then I set up my camera to take two additional exposures. One that's two stops overexposed and one that's two stops underexposed. Now in my particular camera right here, I can set that up in the camera. There's a setting in there that I can do for automatic exposure bracketing and I dial it in to take three different photos at plus two, zero and minus two. The two stops underexposed is allowing our highlights to get detail in them. So, any of the real bright areas, we're going to have detail and tone and color and all those. The two stops underexposed, that's going to allow us to get all the detail in the shadow area. So, now that I've taken care of all the variables I'm in manual mode, I got my daylight white balance, I got my f-stops setup to give me enough depth of field in there, my ISO is low. I've already composed, I got a real nice framing for this photo. Everything's in focus the only thing left to do is just push the shutter on the cable release and it's going to fire off three photos right away for me. In that short amount of time, it's taken those three photos and you want to make sure that you're taking those photos as quickly as possible. So, this camera is set up to take them instantly and what that's going to help do is if there's anything moving in the background, I'm going to have three exposures where let's say the tree branches move and a whole lot. All three of those exposures are going to be real close together and that actually presents a problem in the HDR photography where it's really difficult on a windy day to get great HDR photographs because between all three of those exposures, you have things moving in there. The problem that you have is when you're merging them all together, you have a branch that's here and a branch that's here and a branch that's there. There's a special techniques that I'll show you in an Aurora HDR that's called ghost reduction that will try and help you along but if you notice that you're on a windy day, you may have to sacrifice a little bit of ISO or a little bit of depth of field to give you a faster shutter speed. So, at least the trees aren't blurring between exposures. Then you can use the ghost reduction feature of Aurora HDR to make sure that you don't have any ghosting between those images. So, now that I've taken those three photos, I'm now going to take a look at my histogram. There's a couple of things that I'm going to be looking for. I'm going to want to make sure that my middle exposure is like an average histogram and the points the histogram goes to either end. Now on my overexposed photo, I'm going to see a lot of those blinky highlights because that's going to be really overexposed. I want to make sure that my histogram is shifted enough to the right so that there's a gap going to where the darkest end is. That means I've captured enough of the tonal range in my shadow area. Now in my underexposed photo, it's going to be the opposite. That whole histogram is going to be shifted to the left and I want to make sure I have a little bit of a gap towards the right hand side. What that is telling me is that I got all the highlight detail that I'm going to get out of that photo. Okay, so now that I've checked my histogram and all three of the photos, I know now that I have a great bracketed set that is going to work perfectly inside of Aurora HDR. I'm going to be able to create a photo that has nice shadow detail, nice highlight detail and a nice tonal range throughout.
4. Shooting HDR Photos: So, I'm looking for an interior shot now. I want to get the inside of one of these cars or trucks because they can look really nice and really gritty. You have the old beat up dashboard and the cut up seats and maybe some broken glass, and those aren't that hard to find out here. We got a whole lot of cars to choose from and actually, this here, this dump truck has what I'm looking for. All that texture and detail, you got wires hanging down here. This is another classic example of when HDR photography is really going to be your friend. Because if you normally take a photo like this with just a single exposure, if I take a photo and you can see all the detail inside of here, everything is going to be white throughout the window, you're not going to have anything, it's all going to be blown out, and same thing if I exposed for the shooting through the glass, the interior is going to be dark. So, I'm going to need to do a three exposure bracketed set here for HDR. So, I'm going to position my camera up close and this is a good shot with the 17. What I want to try and do is get part of the door in here, part of the interior, and a little bit of the sky through the windshield. Now, I lowered my shutter speed. When you're shooting HDR, you don't want to be adjusting your F stop. If you adjust your F stop, what's going to happen? You're going to either increase or decrease your depth of field and so you're going to have three different photos with three different levels of depth of field. So, you'll have one photo that has a whole lot of depth of field and everything's in focus. You'll have another photo that has a very narrow depth of field with not a whole lot in focus. So, what you want to be doing when you're shooting HDR is changing your shutter speed. Most of the cameras, when you set it up for if they have an option in the camera to do automatic exposure bracketing, it will do that automatically, it's going to change your shutter speed. If you don't have any automatic exposure correction inside of your camera, you can do it manually. So, what you have to do is set your camera up in manual, we're already in manual mode, and what you do is take your middle exposure, get that nice and fine, then change the setting, change the shutter speed on your camera, and change that plus two stops overexposed and then minus two stops underexposed, and then you'll have all three of those exposures. So, if you're doing that, make sure you're using your cable release. Try not to move your camera at all when you're doing the changing of the shutter speed on your camera and if you have to, use your self-timer if you don't have a cable release. Cool. That'll make a nice one. So, this is one of those photos that is real-time travesty. We're starting to get closer to noon and again, not the best lighting conditions for a landscape photo, but because we're bracketing and because we're exposing for our shadows and for our highlights, we're going to be able to get a real interesting photo even at high noon here out in the desert. Cue the desert music. I think that's going to make a nice HDR photo. Let's go find a couple more locations. Now, this photo here or this scene over here, it has the good characteristics of what would be a good HDR photo. You got the real bright area here and you have the shade on the inside. It could make a really good photo but the thing that bothers me about it is that everything is brown. So, when I'm looking for photographs that inspire me and that I want to take a photo of, having it all brown is just not going to be too exciting for me especially in a color photograph. My workload is a black and white but for a color photograph with having all that same color, it's something that I'm probably going to pass up on. This photo here or this scene here, this truck catches my eye. There's a lot of cool patina going on on here, a lot of coloring, and I'm going to drop down low and get a low angle shot in this car. Okay, so I'm going to shoot at a real low level here. Sometimes, it's good to try different heights on your photographs so you're not always shooting from the same normal standing position. Getting down low with a wide-angle lens can really give you some cool distortion and different views. I'm going to compose this for a vertical photo and I'm getting the truck in the very bottom, this low angle view with a wide angle lens and getting the top area here too. We got some machinery up above and this can make a fun photo. So, what I like about this scene is I got the truck down here in my foreground with a wide angle lens, and I'm shooting really wide and I can get all that machinery up above too. Again, because this is all in the shade and everything else is in the sunlight, this really helps with the HDR photography in doing the bracketing. I'm going to do a quick review, make sure my histogram is good on all three of these, and it is. I really haven't had to change my exposure settings at all and you'll find that, too, once you start going out shooting. The lighting conditions really aren't changing all that much here, so I can just leave all the settings on that I had set up beforehand. So, I got this shot set up right now. It is now high noon out here in the desert, we've got the sun almost directly above us. The rule book say you're not supposed to be out photographing right now, and I'm going to break the rules. I'm going to take a picture of this. I got an interesting truck here that has some nice coloring to it, it has some real old shacks up above there, even a little bit of clouds up in the sky, and I'm not going to ignore this scene. Even though it doesn't look great right now, sometimes, when you put photos into Aurora HDR, you can actually make them even better than what your eyes are seeing right here. Sometimes, the camera picks up things that your eyes aren't seeing. I talked a lot before where the camera doesn't always see as good as your human eye. But every once in a while, it does pick up something that you might not have seen so don't worry about it when you're out there. Get a couple of pictures. It's not going to hurt anything. Take them and then bring it into the software and see what you can come up with and that's what I'm going to do right here. The wind did pick up just a little bit here for a second. I'm going to see if this breeze calms down because I can see the trees in the background, they're blown around a little bit. I'm just going to see if this wind dies down and then I'll take my three exposures. The reason why I'm doing that is to minimize any ghosting or any artifacts that I would have when I'm blending those three photos together. Everything looks good. The wind died down a little bit more. I'm going to shoot a couple of more quick ones just in case. Then I can always take a look on the computer and see which ones are going to make the perfect photos to then blend together. Okay, so I got some really cool photos here at this old ghost town, some photos I'm really excited about, some real great and detailed and you can't go wrong with vintage Americana photos here. So, what we're going to do now is we're going to then go into the digital darkroom and we're going to be used in Aurora HDR Pro and we're going to see what kind of photos we can come up with. Blend those exposures together, bring out some detail, get some real fun things. So, why don't you join me in the digital darkroom?
5. HDR Editing Basics: Well, that was a great photoshoot down at the old ghost town in Jerome, Arizona, and now we're in Sedona, Arizona. We're going to go through and start editing these photos in our digital darkroom using Aurora HDR Pro. I shoot everything in RAW. If you're going to be looking for the highest quality with your HDR photography, be sure to be photographing in RAW. You get the most amount of camera data, the most amount of image data that is going to be coming from your shoot out in the field. So, you know, resist the urge to shoot in JPEG, especially when you're photographing in RAW. If you happen to shoot in JPEG, of course, you can still bring those into Aurora, but definitely go with RAW. I'm just bringing the RAW files just straight into the program and letting Aurora do its magic and it does a heck of a job with the RAW files. So, you know, "Hey, let's get going here and start working on some of these photos." Okay, so we are looking at my Finder, I'm using a Mac. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to select three photos that I want to start editing and in my Finder, I'm just going to click and drag on those three photos, select all three of them and it's so easy to get them into Aurora. There's a couple of different ways, but the easiest way, just select those photos from your Finder and just drag them right onto the icon in your toolbar. Once your photos are then opened up inside of Aurora, we start with this initial dialogue and what it's doing is it's showing us that the HDR is going to be made from this and it shows us our three original photos that we took out in the field and we can see that I have my overexposed photo, I have my dark photo and on the right hand side here I have the photo that has the, it's my middle exposure. On the bottom here, we have three different options here, we have alignment, ghost reduction and chromatic aberration reduction. The alignment you're going to want to use that if you were not on a tripod, if you are hand holding it or if you were using a tripod and you had to use your finger on the shutter to take the picture, you know, there could be just a little bit of movement between each one of the photos. So, if you have any concern that you do have any movement of the camera between any of the three exposures, make sure you have the alignment checked. The ghost reduction, were there trees in the background? Were they blowing a lot? Were they moving around? Were there any other objects in your photo that were moving? People walking, cars moving, things like that. If so, then you're going to want to check ghost reduction. When you check the ghost reduction, you do have a couple options on it. I recommend just starting with the default option for the ghost reduction, see if that works, if it doesn't, bring your photos back into Aurora and try a heavier ghost reduction setting. The photos that were taken today, we had just a little bit of a win, nothing too major. So, I'm actually going to not even use the ghost reduction right off the bat, bringing into Aurora and see if I need to do it. What I'll do when I open up the photo, I'll just zoom in and see if I see any blurrying or any ghosting, and if I do then I'll pull them back out. But, ghost reduction, it takes a little bit of time to then load. There's a lot of calculations going on in the background. So, for speed's sake, I'd just try it without it at first. Chromatic aberration reduction. Now, I'm going to use that pretty much on almost all of my photos. Have you ever looked at your photos and especially in the corners, the edges of the frames, where like a tree branch. A tree branch is really dark relative to the background. Any time you have a real high contrast differential between really bright and really dark. Have you ever see those red fringes that come around on the edges there? That's chromatic aberration. Aurora HDR Pro when you're bringing in RAW files can clean up that chromatic aberration for you. It doesn't hurt to leave it on. This is one of those things that will slow down your computer a little bit just on the initial stages when it loads into the program, but I always have that checked because especially when you're photographing this type of photography, with the cars, there's a lot of high contrast scenes in there, you're bound to have some chromatic aberration. Go ahead and just have that checked. Then the screen button on the right create HDR. I'll then select that. So, now all three of those photos are now being combined into a major 32 bit photo and we can see right now my computer it's taken a little while, it's doing the chromatic aberration reduction, but it's going to be done in a second and then we'll be able to start going and working on the photo. Don't be surprised if it takes a little while to load the photo into the program. So, here we are now, though we are in Aurora HDR Pro. So, I'm going to tell you this, keyboard shortcuts. So, it's going to be command, plus and minus. So, if I'm hitting the plus key on my keyboard, I'm zooming in. If I'm holding on to the command key and hitting the minus key, I am zoom in out. If you zoom in and out a whole lot, you want to fit it back the screen just hold on to that command key and do command zero and it will give you back a fit to view. Scrolling down on the right hand side, we can see are all important histogram, I'd like to see that to make sure that I am not blowing out any highlights or having my shadows get too dark, it's a good visual up there. Scrolling down, we have our tools and controls for doing tone mapping and for adjusting our highlights and shadows and blacks and whites and all the typical controls that you'd see in other photo programs, just like Lightroom and Capture One Pro, all those other programs. A lot of these sliders are very similar, but we also have some that are really specific to Aurora and we have some HDR looks and HDR detail on the bottom. This is where this program is also really cool. They come with a whole lot of presets to get you started and I'm just going to open up the dialog box here. They make a really good starting point for working on your photos especially if you're new to the program, but even if you've been using it for a while, I'd like looking at the presets just to try and get inspired by a couple of looks that maybe I wasn't thinking, I wanted to go in a certain direction with this photo. I can pull up a preset and that might bring me down a whole new path to getting a real nice creative look to the photo. Okay. So, here is the landscape realistic preset and check this out, on the right hand side, everything that is orange means that something is being used in each one of these panels to create this preset. If the panel name is not orange and it's white like the tone curve, that means that there's no adjustments in the tone curve. Again, everything that is orange has some sort of a setting that's been adjusted to create this individual preset. Notice, how glow and details are orange, those are white, so, there has been no controls in here. This is really cool because you can now study the presets and how they were made. So, this is a really cool feature and really helps with the learning of this program. Now, once you've selected a preset, you can go in and open up each one of these panels and fine tune it to your liking. You can also, the circle over here, you can turn the tone adjustments off by clicking on that. So, now what I've done is, I've completely disabled the tone adjustments and now the photo doesn't look like it did anymore without any of those tone adjustments. I can turn this back on, that little circle will be orange. All those tone adjustments are there. So, it's a good way to sort of preview what a particular panel is doing. Image radiance is a cool way to give almost a little bit of a glow and a color saturation boost to your photo. I like use an image radiance on fall foliage when you have those fall colors and it really gives that real nice boost to the color. Now, speaking about previewing the panels on and off, we can preview the whole image on and off by the very top here. We have this eye icon and that is our quick preview. Again, never click on that, I like using shortcuts. So, the shortcut for that is the backslash and on that. So, if I just hit that on and off, I just hold on to it and I can see what the photo looked like originally when it came into Aurora with no adjustments done at all, and then I let go of that and I can see all the adjustments that I've made. This preset looks pretty cool right off the bat here. I'm not going to really do too much with this, and you don't have to do a whole lot of adjustments, if you like one of the presets just the way it is, you're free to just keep it like that. If you want to go a little bit beyond what the preset is doing and make a few more adjustments on the sliders, go right ahead. The only thing I think I'm going to do on this is, I'm going to open up the vignette panel and I'm going to increase my vignette. So, I'm going to lower my amount. It was at 29. I'm going to lower that even more, and I want to bring that down to 66. You can see what that did, that also helped me darken my foreground. My foreground was really bright. That was photographed, that was in the full sun there. Look at all this detail that I have in my shadows. So, by adding this vignette, it's drawn your eyes in towards the center of the photo. I can even adjust this inner light slider. Look at this, I bring this up a little bit to the right and it's going to brighten up the center and not the outer edge. So, let's take a look at what that vignette's doing, turn that on and off. Turn that off and you can see how your eye just kind of falls off the photo down here, there's nothing anchoring it. You need some shadows to bring that back in. So, by end of vignette, turn that back on and look at that. Center is your eyes right into the very center of this photo where all the action is. Now, I like this photo. I am happy with it. So, I can click up on top here and click on Export to Image. If I do that, it's going to give me some options here. I can choose the color space that I want, I can choose the format, a TIFF, a Photoshop document, a JPEG, whatnot. If I wanted to have any compression, I can add that and the bit depth, I can save it in 8 bits or 16 bits and also add a particular resolution. If instead, I want to save it in a proprietary format, the Aurora has, I can go up here and click on File, Save A. Now, this is going to give it an extension of an mpau. This is a proprietary format for Aurora. If you save it in this format, you can then open up that file again, you can be able to open it up in Photoshop, but you can open that file up again in Aurora and all your settings and all your sliders are going to be saved, so you can go back and maybe make some more adjustments to that. So, I'm going to save it in that format right now just in case I want to go back and make some adjustments to that later. I'll click on Save and that's going to go to my hard drive. Once I save, I can open up another photo and start working on another one. So, in this video, I just wanted to give you a real quick sort of a teaser as to what you can do in the program. We can do a whole lot more with that. In the next class, I'm going to be going into a lot more depth, working in layers and making isolated adjustments and really making the photo really pop and can talk about a little bit more creative processes too and also, you know, what's too far with HDR. It's easy to go too far with a photo and you know, what is that definition there? Where is that line? So, be sure to check out my other class as we go a little bit further into the post-processing with Aurora HDR, but in the meantime, "Hey, I'm looking forward to seeing your photos." Be sure to upload your photos into the project gallery. Other people can take a look at them too and comment on them. I'll be taking a look from time to time and it's a really cool way to share your work and get feedback from your peers. So, I want to thank you for watching this class on HDR photography, introduction to HDR photography and using Aurora HDR Pro to enhance your photos. I look forward to seeing your photos in the project gallery and see you in the next class.
6. Explore Photo Classes on Skillshare:
Matt Suess, Fine Art Photographer
