HDR Tutorial with Bracketing and Photomatix Pro Video Lecture | Capture like a Pro: Digital Photography Tutorial - Professional Skills

I'm Tony Northrup and I'm here with my
co photographer Chelsea Knowles today
we're off to Essex Connecticut where
they have this antique steam train to
demonstrate HDR photography for chapter
11 in my book stunning digital
photography if you don't know about it
HDR is a way of taking several different
pictures of a single subject at
different exposures and then blending
them together you don't need a DSLR to
do HDR photography even some
point-and-shoots allow you to control
your exposure compensation and that's
really all you need so here at the train
station the first thing I'm going to do
is just take a picture with my camera
and fully automatic mode so I could
check the histogram yeah looking at the
histogram you can see it's shaped like a
u parts of the picture are underexposed
and parts of the picture are overexposed
can't just use exposure compensation
because something would still be under
or overexposed
so what I'll do is I'll take my first
shot in HDR I'll turn on automatic
bracketing plus and minus two stops and
then set my camera to aperture priority
mode now I'll take three pictures
hand-held checking my histogram I can
see that the underexposed picture is
still leaving the sky blown out and the
overexposed picture isn't picking up all
the shadow detail so what I'll do next
is I will put my camera on tripod and
manually take maybe a full seven
exposures so now what I'll do is I'll
turn auto exposure bracketing back off
because I'm going to control the
exposure manually next I'll switch my
camera to manual mode now I'm choosing
my exposure settings so that my first
exposure is at a full half second at f/8
and you say 100 that should expose the
Train properly but the sky is going to
be very very blown out so I'll take my
first picture and then it will decrease
the shutter speed by half that will
decrease the overall exposure I'll take
another picture go one stop faster again
as I shoot I check the histogram to see
when the sky is properly exposed until
it's properly exposed I'll just keep
decreasing the shutter speed and
shooting again
that histogram looks good in that final
picture the Train is completely dark but
the sky is properly exposed and with HDR
software I'll be able to blend those
together properly back in my desk I'll
load the pictures into photo medicspro
my HDR software as you can see I have
six pictures that I took that day each
had different exposures the HDR software
will blend them together and do a single
photo that will look better than any of
the individual photos you can see the
default settings already make this look
much better photomatix Pro provides
several different presets that you can
select just by clicking these icons at
the bottom of the screen you can also
manually adjust the settings using a
wide variety of different sliders that
they have when you're satisfied with the
results click process here you'll see my
final results after some additional
editing this was done for chapter 11 of
my book stunning digital photography
available now on Amazon for $20 for the
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