What a wonderful world

Well, I’ve been avoiding it a bit, but the truth is, this HDR (High Dynamic Range) editing technique is kind of catching on.  I’ll admit, I’ve seen some really great photos made even better by using this technique, but I’ve also seen some great photos completely ruined by HDR.

The best results I’ve seen have been with landscapes, particularly sunsets, so when we went camping last week to Pedernales Falls State Park, my husband and I went out to the falls at sunset to see what we could come up with.  Below are a few images that came out of tinkering with HDR:

HDR processing has a lot of different aspects to it, but basically, for all of you who don’t speak photo, it’s like if you took a whole bunch of photos of the same thing at the same time and then combined them to make the best possible photo.  You have control over the color, texture, brightness and contrast of the lights, darks and midtones – that is, you do after some practice.

There are a few Photoshop plug-ins that can help make the process quicker, like Photomatix and Topaz.  I used Topaz this time.  I think it has more options to help get away from that completely over-processed look that a lot of HDR photos have.

The top photo was what came out after I used the plug-in for the first time, without any tweaks.  I like it, but you can see that it does look over processed a bit and not very natural.  I, being a photojournalist, have trouble misrepresenting things in photos, so the whole HDR concept is somewhat lost on me, but nevertheless, the colors sure are pretty!  The photos in the middle look a little more natural and the colors were more true to what was actually there.

I would like to find a plug-in that allows me to do HDR sort of like the photomerge tool, so I can keep my layers separate and edit each one accordingly.  I guess I could do that by hand, but it takes a very long time!  Anyone have any suggestions?