HDR and Photoshop: Quick Tips from the Masters

The Photoletariat loved Julieanne Kost’s Playing With Time seminar at PSW last week. Kost went through how to create and manipulate your time-lapse sequence, including some incredible special effects. One of our favorite tricks Kost demoed was using Pixel Bender to create a painting-like effect for some or all of your sequence. Check out more great Photoshop tips from Julieanne Kost.

Matt Kloskowski‘s Thursday afternoon HDR class on the expo floor provided some great tips for getting started in high dynamic range shooting. On HDR, Kloskowski noted, “It’s become a little controversial lately,” adding that the HDR capabilities in Photoshop “sucked” before CS5. “It’s gotten a lot better, which is why you’re hearing more about it.”

“There are kind of two schools of thought with HDR,” Kloskowski says, “There’s more of a natural, realistic type of style, and then there’s the surrealistic.” Whatever your preferred stylistic outcome, it’s important to go into your shoot comfortable with the proper techniques. That way, he explained, you’ll avoid the hassle of bringing in multiple layers and masking inside of Photoshop.

Matt Kloskowski

Here’s how Kloskowski says you should go after that great HDR image: [Take] “your middle shot, which for me, if I had one chance to take a photo, that would be my first shot. And then, in your camera, you turn on what’s called auto exposure bracketing — AEB.  If you’re not sure how to turn it on — it’s different on all cameras. Do a search in your manual for AEB — auto exposure bracketing — and that will turn autoexposure on. And what happens is, you shoot in aperture priority mode — you lock down your aperture because you don’t want depth of field to change. So the shutter speed changes the exposure so you get the middle one. And then you’re going to go two stops under — which, again, auto exposure bracketing automatically does that for you — and then two stops over. So you just keep pressing the shutter — you don’t have to change those things — but the shutter speed will change and give you the shorter or longer exposures.”

Happy shooting!

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