I’m starting here to share my post processing practices. I think it may be helpful to other photographers who didn’t get into this magical world yet. What I’m going to share in this series are photos that I have taken and processed myself. I have learned those techniques from watching a huge amount of training videos, either paid tutorials or public Youtube stuff.
This photo is an HDR (High Dynamic Range). What is HDR? The ability to take a series of different exposures of the same scene and combining them in post processing, so basically all the image is properly exposed.
First, let’s see what Camera settings were used.
Camera …………………. Sony NEX 7
Lens ……………………… 18-200 mm Zoom Lens
Camera Position ….. Handheld
FIle Format …………… RAW
Metering Mode ……… Pattern
Shooting Mode …….. Aperture Priority
Exposure Brkt. ……… Auto bracketing, 3 shots, -2 : +2
ISO ………………………… 100
Aperture ………………… F10
Shutter Speed ………. 1/125 (0.008 sec)
After extracting the three RAW files from the Camera, I have imported them into Adobe Lightroom and exported them in PSD format. Below are how the original photos looked like.
 |
| +2 (Over Exposed) |
 |
| -2 (Under Exposed) |
 |
| 0 (Neutral Exposed) |
Next, opened the three PSD files in Photomatix for the HDR merge process. And here is the resulted photo after playing with the Photomatix sliders. I usually save the Photomatix output in TIF format.
 |
| Tonemapped (Photomatix output) |
The Photomatix output was not clean enough. It had some dust stamps (see below). The dust stamps are very tiny dust grains on my Camera sensor.
 |
| Sensor Dust Stamps |
I’ve opened the image in Photoshop CS6 for some cleanup work (dust & noise). Also, I’ve slightly increased the sharpness of the mountain at the left.
And finally, I’ve taken the Photoshop output image into Adobe Lightroom again for final adjustments of lighting, contrast, clarity & noise reduction. And here comes the final image …
