I have been using Hydra’s aperture plugin to create HDR images from 3 bracketed photos. It’s pretty basic but produces fairly good results without a lot of tweaking. Now HDR Software’s Photomatix is also available as an Aperture plugin. It offers many more options than Hydra, but takes a bit of tweaking to produce a more natural-looking image. It seems to give much better detail, especially in dark areas.
 Created with Hydra |
 Created with Photomatix |
This afternoon the sky looked like it came straight from “The Simpsons”, so I was inspired to take a few shots of the clouds. I decided to do exposure bracketing and use HDR processing so I could enter them in Hydra’s HDR contest.
I took a few shots of tonight’s very spectacular sunset using the D90′s exposure bracketing and created an HDR image from them. I tried both the Hydra plugin for Aperture 2.1 and Photoshop with the Photomatix tone mapping plugin. I found that Photomatix produces a much more vivid image with more detail.
 Hydra Plugin |
 Photoshop + Photomatix Plugin |
The D90′s exposure bracketing feature is great for HDR imaging. When you turn on bracketing, 2 or 3 consecutive shots will automatically use different exposures. If you use continuous mode, simply press and hold the shutter release to take the 2 or 3 bracketed shots. The resulting shots are exactly what you need to merge into an HDR image. I used the Hydra HDR plugin with Aperture 2.1 for this one.
When I was walking home from the gym this evening, the sunset was really spectacular, so I rushed home to get my camera and take a few shots. Since time was running out, I didn’t bother taking the tripod. Here’s a 3 exposure HDR made without a tripod, using Photoshop’s Merge to HDR & Photomatix Tone Mapping.
Creaceed has released a new version of Hydra, which includes a new HDR plugin for Aperture 2.1.
It doesn’t offer as many options as Photomatix, but the results are very nice. These were created with the same source images I had previously processed with Photoshop and the Photomatix plugin. The results look very natural, although it can’t produce some of the more extreme effects.
I’ve been trying out more HDR processing using the Photomatix tone mapping plugin in Photoshop.
Here’s one I took tonight, using 5 exposures at -2.0, -1.0, 0, +1.0, and +2.0EV.
Here’s one I took a few days ago, using only 3 exposures at -2.0, 0, and +2.0EV.
Here’s an HDR image I created from three raw images. I imported them into Photoshop, used the ‘Merge to HDR’ automation, and adjusted the color, luminance & contrast with the Photomatix tone mapping plugin. The flowers moved slightly between the shots, resulting in some ghosting around the edges.
Asides
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