OK, I know I was telling you a lot about HDR on my blog here but not in all the cases HDR really works well!
I am still producing the majority of my photographs using the HDR technique but sometimes I have started working on a single picture using either Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom.
HDR will never work if there is some movement in the photograph (well, sometimes you can use Photomatix’s deghosting option) but sometimes it is just not about what I would like to take a picture of…
Or, on peoples skin! That will never work! Never ever!
My camera settings are almost still the same:
- A-Mode for the camera
- No Bracketing
- (sometimes) increase the ISO
With the A-Mode I will still select an F-Stop of 7.1 and above so everything is perfectly in focus, even the foreground. If you still want to have HDR as an option for later, leave the function enabled. Who says that you have to process al 3 images?
If now I have unwanted movements in the photograph or I am not on a tripod, I will have to increase the ISO until I am able to have a steady handheld shoot. Usually this is max. 1/60 sec at wide-angle lenses. If there are fast moving objects like trains or cars, you will have to have a slower shutter speed!
NOTE: For that kind of environment I am standing still either doing a hand held shoot or on a tripod. The idea here is to post process a single photograph where the situation HDR or longer exposure is not possible.
[fancy_header type=”3″]Why did I take those pictures using the described Settings?[/fancy_header]
Let me start with The Red Tree. The photograph taken in Havana of the red tree has two Problems.
The Wind
While I took this photograph it did wind, not heavily, only mild. I had bracketing enabled for this photograph and to when post processing this photograph using Photomatix pro, I most probably would have been able to de-ghost the image.
The Background
Photomatix did something to this photograph that I really did not like, especially in the background. So I have decided to not proceed with HDR.
The picture of the tree is almost only post processed using Adobe Photoshop using textures and layers in combination.
The almost only thing I have done in Adobe Lightroom is changing White balance and gave it a little contrast for the first image and did a high key on the second (same) image. Later I have started in Adobe Photoshop combining the images.
The second photograph of the Hotel Pool Area in Varadero was created by using first Adobe Lightroom. I have started playing with the slider in Adobe Lightroom because I also had some wind. I liked it so much that I not even have tried to use HDR, I jumped into Adobe Photoshop for the final retouching like cropping, final color adjustment etc.
Last but not least: The Fisherman in Cuba
For this photograph I have only used Adobe Lightroom. I played not only with all the sliders, also the bottom part of the photograph has a graduated filter to increase the blackness in the picture.
Here the issue is the bottom part if you would process the picture using the HDR technique and also the people moving while taking the multiple photographs.
