Subtitles of the Movie

Welcome to this lesson on converting single exposure camera raw shots and multiple bracket photos for use later in HDR. Let's open up working folder and go down and find our single camera raw photograph of a horse. Ideally, you want to be able to set your camera up on a tripod and have a nice, stable setting and shoot three bracketed exposures of the scene, but you can't obviously do that all the time. In this case I had the camera in my hand and the horse was running by and I just was able to take one picture. Even if I had the camera on a tripod, I don't have the frames per second speed on the camera to be able to shoot three photos at such a speed that the horse would not appear to move anyway. So, in this case, one photo is really all you're going to get. You've got to work with that. Thankfully it is possible using the Raw file. Make sure that your Raw Conversion Program is set to 16 bits, if not click on the Workflow Options in Adobe Camera Raw and set that to 16 Bits per Channel. This preserves the high bit-depth nature of the Raw File into the TIFF, which we'll save later. Now, let's go to the settings. You can approach this in a few different ways. You can zero them out and create a clean Preset, by and large, taking out the Sharpening, and the Noise Reduction and so forth, and then save that, but before we do, the entire purpose of bringing the single raw shot into Adobe Camera Raw is to manipulate the exposure you are in Adobe Camera Raw. What you're going to do is manipulate this by minus 2 to begin with to create the underexposed photo. This reduces the highlights down so that they're not blown out, underexposed basically, and then we'll save one at the exposure level and then save one at plus 2. This actually blows out the highlights, but it brings up the shadows so that the details within them can be discerned. That's what you want to do. So, to do this I can create a Preset called Minus 2 and let's just save that, save all the settings here and just call this Clean Minus 2. Now, every time I want to do this for different photos I just come, select that Preset, save the image. I've got my Saved folder at the same location as where the file is. The filename here is, I want to change the document name is going to stay the same because 64, 65 that's going to be the same photograph and instead of ACR Creative, I would like ACR -01, indicating this is the first photo in the bracket. Filename, extension, and format are TIFF, so let's save that. That gave us the underexposed bracket. Now, coming back here and setting this at zero is in effect my clean preset, so I can save this, ACR 02, and now coming back I can modify the exposure to plus 2, I can, in fact, save that as a Preset, and this just increases the speed of the workflow. Change that filename to 3. Now we have three bracketed photos. Now, pay attention to the photo as it is. You don't have to use minus 2 to plus 2 slavishly. If the photo's a little bit underexposed to start with you may have to change the exposure levels upward. By the same token, if it's overexposed you might want to bring those default levels down. You can also create artistic embellishments, such as changing the toning, hues, and so forth along the way. The end result is three bracketed photos. These will be used in Photoshop and Photomatix, to create the Raw. One, two, three. It's like we had three bracketed photos to start with. Now the end result Ð I'm going to bump up a folder here Ð here's the original photograph saved from JPEG out of the camera. It's a nice photograph, but then using this one photograph converted to raw, and then to HDR, we can achieve this. This was converted from one Camera Raw. It's a very powerful example of how HDR can work even using one photo as long as it's raw.