More Photographic Creativity
We went off to Islay for Christmas which gave me a chance to really acquaint myself with my camera and what it can do. I started playing around with the bracketing feature which provided some interesting results; it is good to be able to hold the shutter button and get three photographs of different exposures, one under exposed, one normal, and one over exposed, like those below:-
Normal
Under exposed
Over exposed
Now this is all very well, but what to do with them, none of them actually reflect the scene photographed. Then, whilst attempting to rescue what I actually saw with my graphics package I reached for the HDR (High Dynamic Range) merge function. What it actually does is to take, in my case, three photos, align them one above the other, then allow you to change brightness and contrast settings before merging them into one HDR photograph just like the one below, which was constructed from those above…
Taken beside the Laphroaig distillery on Islay
Update Dec. 31 2008
For those interested the graphics package I have been playing with here is Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate, which I find much improved on my previous version, and equal to Photoshop (which is seberal times the price). P.S. for anyone thinking of buying this package it can be found much cheaper than on the official website, from places like Amazon for instance.
oh that is interesting, thanks for going through the process and the final version of the photo is beautiful….
December 31, 2008 at 8:33 am
CGP: it is indeed an interesting process, and one which I think brings photographs to life giving them a much more realistic look. The graphics package I am playing around with is “Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate” which is not only cheaper than Photoshop, but I think its equal, especially now that it has some features that Photoshop doesn’t… I have linked to it in an update on the post.
December 31, 2008 at 10:26 am
I’m using PSP X2 as well, guess I’ll have to check out that feature at some point…
January 4, 2009 at 9:53 pm
I was a bit sceptical about X2 at first Armin, hence playing with a TBYB version first, but it is excellent and I have finally purchased the full version. I have tried out several HDR software packages and found them somewhat too complex, the good thing about the X2 feature is that, whilst not giving quite as good results as professional packages, it is easy to use. However you can then go on to play around with brightness, contrast and saturation etc. to get the results you want…
January 4, 2009 at 10:12 pm