Beyond ETTR & HDR Tonemapping – 32 Bit In Lightroom

Magazine - Digital Photo Pro, Software - Lightroom  Comment
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Image by Ragnar th Sigurdsson.

To one degree or another, we’ve all been underexposing our digital photographs, even if we’ve been exposing to the right (ETTR). Imagine a day when every ƒ-stop had as much data as the lightest ƒ-stop. It’s here now. Here’s how.

Make a series of bracketed exposures where each ƒ-stop in a scene is placed in the far right of the histogram or recorded with half the data in a single digital file. Combine all the exposures into a single 32-bit file using either the Merge To HDR Pro feature in Adobe Bridge/Photoshop or Lightroom. Save or import this 32-bit file into Lightroom (4 or higher) and apply adjustments with its Develop module to avoid many common tone-mapping artifacts.

You may be surprised to find that you’ll benefit from using this technique even for images with significantly more restrained dynamic ranges.

Read more on Digital Photo Pro.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

The Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush In Lightroom 4 – Julianne Kost

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Julianne Kost demonstrates the power of making selective adjustments like dodging and burning, color corrections and noise removal using the Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush in Lightroom 4. Note: although this video was recorded in Lightroom, the same techniques are available in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS6.
View more Lightroom videos here.
Learn more from Julianne Kost on her blog.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Video Quick Tip – Feathering Selections & Masks In Photoshop

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In this Photoshop Quick Tip I show when and how I feather selections for maximum control.

Read more about Selections & Masks.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Photoshop – Using The Lens Blur Filter On An Image Sequence – Julianne Kost

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“Even with the fantastic new Blur Gallery in Photoshop CS6, the Lens Blur filter is an essential tool when a high degree of control is needed to selectively (and realistically) blur an image. In this video tutorial, Julieanne Kost uses the Lens Blur filter with a depth map to to create a series of images that appear as if they were captured with a tilt-shift lens. Julieanne also demonstrates how to quickly apply this filter to multiple images using actions and batch processing.”
View more Photoshop Videos here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

The Newly Redesigned Crop Tool In Photoshop CS6 – Julianne Kost

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“There are several advantages to the newly redesigned Crop tool in Photoshop CS6. In this video tutorial, Julieanne demonstrates the refined interface, new features, customizable presets, enhanced tools and essential shortcuts that will make cropping easier than ever.”
Plus find Julianne’s list of crop tool short cuts here.
View more Photoshop videos here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Creative Sharpening With HDR Software

Technique - Sharpening  Comment
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HDR software is most typically used to render shadow and highlight detail, but it also can be used to enhance tonal separation and detail in any range of tones, even in images with extremely low contrast. The very same tools that are used to compensate for HDR side effects can be used to sharpen any image.
When multiple bracketed exposures are merged into a single processed file, shadows and highlights that exceed the dynamic range of a camera’s sensor are compressed into the dynamic range of a digital file, taking the midtones with them. Depending on the HDR software used, a variety of tools are available to restore contrast and separation in midtones. If used aggressively, these tools produce the telltale signs of contemporary or grunge HDR artifacts: halos and texture accentuation. These are the very same artifacts that digital sharpening routines use more conservatively to make images appear sharper—only they look different.
Unlike the hard halo and line produced by the filter Unsharp Mask and more like the soft line produced by the filter High Pass, HDR sliders can give you still more points of control over line and texture, each with a slightly different flavor.
Find details on using Adobe Photoshop and NIK’s HDR Efex Pro.
Read the full article on Digital Photo Pro.
Find more sharpening resources here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.