Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 Tutorials
Adjusting Landscapes / HDR - High Dynamic Range pt. 1
Visitors to VTC.com will be able to view all introductory videos for each training course.
Free Trial Members will gain access to first three chapters for each training course.
Full Access Members have full access to VTC.com�s entire library of video tutorials.
Learn More
Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 / Adjusting Landscapes / HDR - High Dynamic Range pt. 1)
HDR is a raging fad in digital imaging these days, and everyone wants to learn it. Few people really understand what it is, and how to do it correctly, yes there are myriad third party plugins for you, that will do the process for you, but understanding what HDR is, both as a special effect and as an image enhancement technique, will enable you to better judge when you should use HDR, or just leave well enough alone. And as I have always said, less is more. Now HDR as you know is acronym for High Dynamic Range. Now Dynamic Range is the number of stops, or levels of brightness between complete white, and complete dark that the camera can see. The best digital cameras currently available can capture about nine to ten stops of Dynamic Range, even though you might see more stops on your lens. The human eye on the other hand can capture about 24 stops of Dynamic Range, meaning it can perceive detail in 24 major divisions of levels of brightness. There's quite a bit of mathematics involved in this discussion, and since math was my worst subject in school, let's simplify this discussion. The human eye can see detail in a much wider variation of brightness, than a digital camera, thus HDR. Now we can manually adjust an image or series of images, to approximate what the human eye can see, over a range of brightness, and we're going to go over the processes that will enable you to balance the Dynamic Range in a manner that it doesn't look like you did balancing on the Dynamic Range. So let's take a look at these two pictures of Yosemite Valley, in Yosemite National Park, and of course we have the Merced River here, and the real problem you have on this image, is that you've got a very bright background here, in the sky, and a very dark foreground, and we want the foreground elements to be as prominent as the background elements. Now if you were standing at this scene, the human eye would be able to see all of the detail here, and all of the detail here very, very clearly. You wouldn't have any need for Dynamic Range. But the camera has to choose. It can expose for this area, and let this area be a little bit difficult to see, at least the detail, or we can look at this image, and we can completely blow out this area, and expose for detail in the foreground. But it's very difficult to get one shot, that's going to do both the same way. So we have to combine the two elements in each of the photographs to balance the Dynamic Range. Let's go up, and pull up a split view, hold down the Shift key, and doesn't matter which one of these you drag on top of the other. It doesn't have any bearing what so ever, you can do it one way or the other, left-click, hold it down, drag it over, let go, and then we have this image on top of the other image. Let's go back to a single view, go down to the background layer, Control J, and then we're going to come up to layer one, get a mask, make sure it's chosen, go get the Brush, and that's about the right size tip. I don't want 100 percent on the opacity, because I want to blend this in, so we're going to take this down to about 25 percent, and then we're just going to blend in the foreground element down here on this center layer. So let's go ahead and paint that in, and you can see the brightness coming up on the foreground. I'm going to reduce the size here, so I can get into these trees. We can bring out some detail in these trees, then go across, back and forth, and now we have an image, and it was a very simple quick, easy thing to do. We have an image that gives us balanced Dynamic Range. But it doesn't have that special effect look to it, which is what you're trying to achieve. I mean there's two ways to do HDR. And we can do special effect HDR, or we can do balanced Dynamic Range HDR. I really lean towards the balanced Dynamic Range because I think, I think it just makes a more natural looking image.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 |
| Author: | Phil Hawkins |
| SKU: | 34227 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-92-5 |
| Release Date: | 2011-05-25 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 117 lessons |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
VTC Sign up & Benefits
- Unlimited Access
- 81,350 Video Tutorials (14,200 free)
- Video Available as Flash or QuickTime
- Over 715 Courses
- $30 for One Month Access
- Multi-User Discounts Available
