Subtitles of the Movie

Welcome to this lesson on creating HDR from within Photomatix. Now if you've jumped directly to this lesson I want to warn you that generating HDR is not the same as Tone Mapping and then Post Processing. This is an interim step the result of which really is unusable on your current monitor or printer. Let's fire Photomatix Pro and look at the Workflow Shortcuts here. Now if you've got a Macintosh version your interface will be slightly different, but functionally it's all the same. So find your Generate HDR Image button and click it, and if it's a Menu Option, go ahead and find that in the Menus and select that. This opens the Generate HDR selecting source Images dialog box where we do exactly that. Click Browse, select your files Ð and I'm holding down Control as I select them to select multiple ones Ð and I'm selecting an additional one on purpose there, so I can put those in the dialog. Now if I've made a mistake I can select it and Remove it. So there's some flexibility there. When I'm satisfied, I'm going to press OK. Now, here's where we see some significant improvement over the Photoshop interface of Merge to HDR. Not only do we have the line source images, but we can decide whether to Crop or not, we can Reduce chromatic aberrations, and so forth. I'll walk through these options one at a time. Aligning Source Images, you've got two options. First by matching horizontal and vertical shifts. If you hold your mouse over this option you can see the help. This corrects for Translation only, but is faster. Matching Features applies to Translation and Rotations but is a little bit longer. So if you think the background, or image has been shifted left to right or up or down, choose the top one. And I don't think I've ever had any problem with that being incorrect. You can also decide whether to Crop or not, and I prefer to crop afterwards, so I always leave this checked. Reduce chromatic aberrations applies to high-contrast areas are always more prone to purple, blue, cyan, pinkish glows and halos, so if you leave this checked Photomatix is going to try to reduce those. Reducing Noise is a good option because Noise and HDR go hand-in-hand with each other unfortunately, because you're combining multiple exposures, you're also combining Noise. So, the background noise level is always going to raise when you're creating HDR. I always leave that checked. Attempt to reduce ghosting artifacts, that happens when you're shooting your bracketed photos and if you're shooting, let's say, trees or water you might have ripples in the water, unless it's absolutely still, or the wind may be moving the leaves back and forth just a little bit so you've got movement in the foliage. You could also have moving objects like cars and people in your photographs and this will attempt to reduce the ghosting artifacts created because let's say a person is walking through your bracketed photos. On one photo they may appear on the left, and on another photo they may have moved a few feet, so they're going to look like ghosting if you leave those in there. And this can't remove them entirely, but it can try to reduce the impact. You've got two Detection Methods: normal and high. Finally, you've got a Take tone curve color profile, which is recommended, you can also Attempt to reverse-engineer, or apply them in a linear fashion. For the most part just leave this on the recommended setting. Now select OK to start the process. It's going to take a little bit of time depending on several factors. First of all how large are your images? Are you shooting with a six-megapixel camera? Eight? Ten? Twelve? Fourteen? It also depends on obviously the speed of your computer within the settings that you chose in that dialog box. Producing noise, chromatic aberrations, alignment all take more time so if you uncheck them and basically have a very streamlined process, this isn't going to take very long. Having said that, I've generated HDR files from 7, 9 photographs and it's rarely taken more than just a little bit of time. And if anything probably extending that time here because I'm also running a full-screen video capture and voiceover at the same time, which puts a little more stress on the computer. When that's done you've got the HDR file that shows up in the large window and an HDR viewer in the left side, which you can move your mouse around in the main window and take a gander at some of the details there. And for our purpose this is kind of an irrelevant window. It tells you your HDR's done. You can, in fact, save it if you want to. We're not going to do much from here besides move on to Tone Mapping. But this shows you that the process has been completed and you're ready to move on.