Have you struggled to make a great image when shooting into the sun? Our cameras can’t see the dynamic range in a scene as well as our own eyes can, so we have to shoot a series of bracketed images and merge them into an HDR. In this tutorial, I walk you through exporting to HDR from Lightroom to create two sun-flared images with Photomatix Pro.
Nick,
Thanks for the tutorial. I have been using Photomatix for some time, but mostly for straight HDR conversions. I did notice that in the final shot of the lifeguard tower there was a bit of a shadow (halo) around the two vertical poles. It looked like that shadow disappeared during the processing of the image but then jumped back again at the end. Shadows and halos are something I fight constantly when playing in HDR. Seems just as I get the photo the way I want it, I get to the halos. Drives me nuts!
John
Hey John – good eyes! Depending on how you process the image, you can get halos. I’m pretty sure the halo came when I double-processed the original image (but I only single-processed the image in the video). To eliminate halos, I usually go back to the original images and find one with the correct exposure for the halo’d area and then bring it into Photoshop to mask out the halo. Make sense? I can write up a post on it if you’d like. – Nick
Nick,
I think I get it, but it would be great if you could go through that last step you mention. Where you mask out the halo.
Thanks,
John