HDR workflow (bullet points)

Last night I posted a gallery link showing 12 images from a recent shoot.  Half taken with a Sigma SD14, half with a Nikon D3.  Shots 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 and 10 were taken with the SD14 and shots 4, 6, 8, 9, 11 and 12 were taken with the D3.

I could have shot the entire shoot with either camera… so why the split?  Well, that day there was a pretty intense glare off the gulf and I wanted to use a circular polarizer for most of the water shots.  You can’t use filters on the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G lens.  It has a protruding round end on the lens and doesn’t take filters.  It does extremely well handling glare (amazing actually), but I can’t get a circular polarizer on it.  Hence why you’ll notice that almost all the shots with water in frame were with the SD14 + Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 DC EX + Circular Polarizer.

The one balcony shot I took with the D3 was a south west view.  So with the sun situated off a bit to the southeast, the glare for that shot was milder than any other angle.  Also, I wanted to go a full 14mm for one balcony shot to give the potential rental customers a sense of space out there on the patio.  I can’t get that wide on the SD14.  The SD14 crop factor is 1.7 so the 10-20mm acts like a 17mm at the widest point (10mm x 1.7 factor).  I’d have preferred to have been able to go a bit wider, but I sacrificed width in order to get better exposures and with the filter, make the gorgeous Emerald Coast water (here in North West Florida) stand out.

Using a Circular polarizer creates its own issues of course, but I was willing to work around those sky density issues in photoshop in order to improve the image hitting the sensor.  It really helps big time with darkening the sky and a side benefit is it reduces the glare off the water.  I knew if I used the filter I could get away with only a 3 AEB with the SD14 because the filter was in effect reducing the difference in exposure of sky to ground.

For several of the interior shots I needed the width of the D3 for certain shots (definitely the bathroom shots).  I’d probably have just shot the whole thing with the SD14 to not have to mess with different post production workflows.  If I’m shooting for an architect or builder I don’t normally go as wide as 14mm, but I needed it for this shoot.  The rental companies want every single room no matter how small and as such, 14mm comes in handy for bathrooms and small bedrooms (and bunk beds in rooms).

Rental companies and realtors just want shots turned quickly so I generally skip merging to HDR and tonemapping for these shoots.  All 12 shots were using my alternate method of achieving (compressing) a high dynamic range into a narrow one.  “Exposure Blending”.

I’m told that Photomatix has the Enblend (or similar) code baked into it and if you use it’s exposure blending feature rather than tonemapping, you should get decent results.  The process is to feed it your multiple exposures and the code does some fancy math and then blends the exposures together to give a more balanced exposure.

The BIGGEST reason to use exposure blending over a merge to HDR, then tonemap approach is that you can actually BLEND various shots of natural light, flash, etc… to be blended into one final image.  I’m realizing now that it would take many paragraphs to walk you through this and I don’t have the time.

In fact I have just a few minutes to finish up this post.  I’m against the clock here to finish an edit and I’ll be up most the night to complete it and meet a deadline.  So I’ll bullet point some of the apps I used.

For the SD14 shots I used the provided software Sigma Photo Pro which is their raw converter.  To date their converter does the best job converting their FOVEON sensor raw files (X3F).  And it has one slider that is SICK!  It is like a tonemapper.  It is a fill light of sorts, but it is actually acting like a tonemapper.  I’d have to show you to have you understand.  Anyway… Once I tweak the SD14 raw files I then export 16 bit tiffs and then use the open source “Enblend” software.  Then finalize edits in Photoshop.

For the D3 I use LightRoom, make tweaks, then select those exposures and go FILE>ENFUSE using the Enfuse LightRoom plugin and it spits out a 16 bit tiff that I also finish off in Photoshop.

I expected to go a bit further in detail, but have to get back to editing this last shoot!

~~~ POOF ~~~