Image & Video Galleries > HDR - High Dynamic Range

Is there a primer for HDR from 5D3? How to bracket shots? PP?

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tolusina:
Here is link to a a step by step Instructable for HDR in GIMP...
http://www.instructables.com/id/HDR-photos-with-the-GIMP/#intro
It seems a little intimidating at first, once you've done it once or twice you'll find it quite easy.

I've been fairly pleased bracketing 3 frames, -1, 0, +1, or -1.5, -0.5, +0.5 depending on the subject and the lens.
In my opinion, anything beyond ±1 stop gives results too surreal in appearance for my tastes.

TrumpetPower!:
The built-in HDR on the 5DIII is great for generating quick-and-dirty previews. Unless you have reason to know that it's not good enough, just set it in full auto mode, make sure the JPEG it generates is roughly what you had in mind, and then worry about post-processing when you get back to the studio.

Once there, you'll probably get the best results by putting all three (or however many) images in layers in a single Photoshop file and then using a soft brush to composite in or out the appropriate bits of each image. In the simplest version, you'd mimic a graduated neutral density filter by using only two shots and a gradient mask to blend from the one to the other. In a more complicated shot with blue sky, backlit mountains, and a bright snowy plain in the foreground, you'd have two gradients, one between the mountain / sky transition and the mountain / snow transition -- something you can't (easily / cheaply) do in the field with filters but is trivial with multiple exposures.

More complicated scenes will require more complicated masks and possible more exposures, but it'll be rare that you need to composite together more than three exposures. You might, however, need to adjust how much space between said exposures...if you were inside a mine shooting out the entrance and wanted to include both the inside and outside, you might only need two exposures, but separated by several stops. And you'd need a (non-existent) moderately-hard-edged donut-shaped ND filter to do it in-camera, but only a few minutes in Photoshop.

Have fun!

b&

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