This is my first Tutorial. And I'm sorry not to make a Step by Step one, I guess I'm too lazy to do so, but still the information is here.
Today I'm gonna show how do I make my HDR, is in everything pretty much how you see in other peoples tutorials except the end treatment. I hope you enjoy.
I take my shots in RAW and that allows you to edit a little bit the exposure without compromise the picture.I do create my different exposures using Lightroom, but this can be used with any kind of software that can read the RAW format.
In Lightroom I just import the picture create two virtual copies and the first one on exposure I define the values to -1 and the second to 1. Then I export into 3 tiff 16 bit files.
This is how i chose my process:
For this picture this were the values I used:
- Strength 97
- Color Saturation 66
- Luminosity +10
- Micro Contrast +7
- White Point 2.932
- Black Point 0.009
- Gama 1.01
- Temperature 0
- Saturation Highlights +3
- Shadows Highlights -3
- Micro Smoothing 0
- Highlight Smoothing 34
- Shadow Smoothing 0
- Shadow Clipping 0
Process and save. And now Photoshop.
Well first of all copy the blending image to the tonemaped one and select "Soft Light" as blending mode. Some people prefer the overlay one but I like Soft Light better.Merge both of them and and create a second copy (Command+J in mac or Ctrl+J in windows).
Here I'm gonna use high pass to sharpen my image.
So Filters -> Others -> High Pass
The best thing about High Pass is that you can see were are getting the emphases. I like to it to the clouds.After you getting satisfied on your value you gonna blend this now grey layer into Soft Light and merge both of them.
After this the image will have some noise on it, so it's time to remove it.
I use the Noiseware Professional from Imagenomic.
By now you're project should be good. With color. But I like to had some mood into my HDR and i thing that's what makes it different from others.So for that I use a simple thing. I create a new empty layer, and then I select the Gradient tool (G), and I chose radial Gradient with opacity of 50%, I'll go choose a nice warm orange color as my main color and black as second color. I create the gradient were I want the focus to go and I blend it. In this case I've opt for Overlay, but sometimes is too strong and I'll go for soft light.
And that's the final result. Some cropping and adding borders, perhaps a title and is done.
Hope you enjoy it!

João Carneiro


