Lessons
Class Introduction
04:44 2Bracketing
10:31 3How to Set-up Bracketing
02:54 4Tools to Capture HDR Better
02:09 5Scenes for Good HDR
07:49 6Process Images in Lightroom® & Photoshop
10:52 7Hyper HDR Style with Photomatix
11:39 8Post Processing in Lightroom®
07:56Lesson Info
Post Processing in Photoshop®
And inside of Photoshop, I will take the bumper from one and put it into, softly, the other picture. So right now, I have these two pictures, right? Here's... okay, come on, hurry it up. It's deciding to mock me while we're working. Just gonna edit this inside of Photoshop. I'll grab this picture. I'm just going to do it old school. Drag it, put it in right there. (gasps) Does anybody notice something? Take a look at the picture, watch this I'm gonna zoom in. You guys might see it in the chat too. What's the problem? Alignment. Alignment. So those pictures did move! Not cool. How do we fix it? Single click on one of the layers, Shift + click the second layer inside of the list. Once you have those two selected you'll see these and if you you have to have the two layers selected and you have to have the move tool selected. If you do not have the move tool selected this does not look the same. Watch. Move tool. And now look up here. Three dots. Three dots. That allows you to align or...
distribute. What I wanna be able to do is I wanna be able to auto align. So auto align these layers. I'm gonna select auto and now look. Not bad. So now, what I want to do is I wanna go into the concept of masking. Right? What we'll do here is we're gonna take this layer and we're gonna hide this layer. We hide this layer with a mask. I believe you guys have masking classes on CreativeLive so if you're not familiar with masking make sure that you go take a look at CreativeLive (mumble) the concept of masking. If you don't, I'll send you a video it'll be totally cool. But what I can do here is I can take this mask, notice this layer's selected here, this icon on this layer right here is the mask. If you click on it, it creates a mask that reveals the entire content of the layer. As indicated by the color white. If the color were black, it would be hiding the contents of this layer. Two ways to have it create that color black. Once you create the white, you can do a Command or Control + I to invert the mask. Invert from white to black or what you could do is you could take the... Let's see, come back over here. When you take this mask and you drag this mask into the trash I'll delete the mask. The moment that you create the mask hold down the Option key. Hold down the Option key and click on the mask and it automatically makes it and fills it with black. So it saves you a step. Now, from here I'm gonna do Command + Space bar and I'm gonna drag to the right. There's the offending bumper and I'm going to use the letter B for the brush tool. And, I hate doing this I'm gonna bring this up right now. Come over here, drag the size, no. Drag the size, too small. Drag the size, no. It's annoying. Right. So more often than not that's how people get used to your keyboard shortcuts. Your keyboard shortcuts are your friends, right. On a Mac, what I usually tell people is use the Control key and use the Option key. So the actual Control key, the one that's all the way on the left, and the Option key. Hold them both down and when you drag to the right it gets bigger. Drag to the left it gets smaller. Big small big small big small. If you drag up, it gets softer. If you drag down, it gets harder. Soft, hard, soft, hard, big small big small big small. Now, from inside of here, I can go ahead and paint this in a little bit better. If I find that I'm still getting the color mask, right, I'm getting back all of the texture that I was looking for but I'm not taking care of a lot of that color problem. I could always come back over here, click on this black and white adjustment layer and I can go to hue and saturation. With a hue and saturation adjustment layer I can take that color out, right. What color is that? Does anybody know? Me neither (laughs). I have no idea. But what I do know is I can use this guy. That guy is the, nobody in the audience knows and neither do you, so just point to the color tool. Or, the targeted adjustment tool. I can click on that tool, click on the color, and drag to the left, and all that color is gone. Across the entire image. Be careful. But, because I've done that, and I did that on a layer, there's an adjustment layer where the color of white. What are we gonna do? We're gonna invert so that we hide that layer. And then with a brush with a color of white I can come back in, small brush, soft brush, I make sure that my brush has a low flow. And then I paint back in that desaturated color. So I come back in here I come back in here and I pull all of this stuff out. And when I tell people it took me six hours to work on a file, whenever I say that, A, I'm usually lying cause it doesn't take me six hours to work on anything and B, if someone were to say that, it's this. This is the way that... That's what they're generally talking about. I gotta be honest with you that when I'm working on these kinds of pictures more often than not, I am not using adjustment brushes in Lightroom. I am in Photoshop. I am almost always using adjustment layers to be able to do that. Because I feel like I don't get the level of granularity, and I'm just doing a hack job here at the top. I don't don't feel like I get the level of granularity. Oh! That K is still a mess. That I normally would get inside of the brush of Lightroom. I want to be able to work on a pixel level down here. So. This is also one of the other things that I would tell people, this is where like a Wacom tablet, like, shines. I am more often than not I can do email, I can grab, I can do all of this stuff with a mouse. If I'm doing retouching, masking, like all day long I'm working on this. They just came out with a small one, the Pro, so now I can like stick that in my book bag. Which I think is great. But are we good so far? Right? So we're moving color problems. I want to do some brightness now. Right? So what I'm gonna do is this. I'm gonna use the same levels here, or use all of these adjustments that I've done before to increase a little bit of brightness. I'm gonna click on the black and white section, I'm gonna go to curves, and under curves I'm gonna grab the center of the curve and I'm gonna drag it all the way up. It makes the entire image bright. I don't want the entire image bright. I actually just want the chrome, that I just did, bright. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to the layers panel. Notice that I have all of that chrome work that I did here under the hue and saturation layer. If I were to grab that and drag that from here up here, right, if I take this mask and I drag it on top of here, it's gonna say, "Do you want to replace it?" Not good. Right? But it does solve the problem, like I want it to use the work that I did here up here. Not good, though. Instead, hold down the Option key. When you hold down the Option key and you drag a mask on top of another one, you're gonna drag a copy. So now, same masks. I can go over here, I usually pull out my properties so that I can see it, and from here, watch. And I can get it right where I need it. And I'm done. But the play is exactly the same. Make an adjustment, take a mask, hide the mask, brush, low flow. I use low flow over opacity. Right. Compositing, mixing, like anything that you're doing... Do you guys know the difference between flow and opacity? You want to cover it for a second? We'll cover it for a second. I'm looking at my time, I'm like, okay! I'll do it! Here, quickly, it won't take long. I promise. Option + delete. I usually like starting in black cause I think it makes it a lot easier. I'm gonna switch to a color of white. Now, I'm gonna take my flow at the very top and I move my top to and I'm gonna take my opacity to and just show you one brush stroke. Right? One brush stroke from one side to another side. Even, straightforward. All right. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my opacity and then move my opacity to about 13%. And I'm gonna move this from one side to the other side. So that's 13%. If I move back, still, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, still 13%. You have adjusted what the end of that color is supposed to look like. When you draw on top of it, it is going to be 13% plus 13%. 26%. Right? That does not provide a lot of finessing. It is the equivalent, like I like to use the garden hose analogy. Right, I think it helps. If I gave you a cup, and I gave you a hose, and I turn the hose full tilt, and I told you to fill that cup halfway full of water, how hard would it be for you to fill it? Probably pretty hard, right? Halfway? Like you'd be like, (grunting sounds) trying to hit it, right? So, when you have your opacity at 100, it's kinda hard for you to have any kind of finesse. However, if you took that same hose, and you turned it all the way down to a trickle, if you adjusted the rate at which the water came out, if you needed this, you could quickly go through it. But, if you come back to an area, you can do something with a lot more finesse. So more here, less here. Tiny bit here, tiny bit here. A lot more here. So flow will give you that kind of finesse. Infinitely more than you will by adjusting your opacity. So any kind of adjustments that you make, any kind of masking that you do, will almost always have variations of flow. And if you're using, like, Wacom tablets, you can do pressure sensitivity for flow as well. Which makes it even better still. This is the second part of the process. So the more you learn about it, the better it is. So. From here, I can come back over here and you know what? I'm going to pull a little bit of the saturation down at the bottom and I'm going to really go back in and just nurse all of these different sections. Like, I don't like the way this blue looks, right here. I don't like the way this looks right here. Now. Done. At that point I can do one of two things. At that point I can do a save and close... I'll do a save and close. I'm going to close this file, I'm gonna close this example file, and I'm going to go back into Lightroom.
Ratings and Reviews
Liz Farrell
It truly doesn't matter if this instructor creates work that looks different from what I like to make. What I got from this course were skills I needed to try something new. (In my case, I watched this before doing some interior photography, knowing I would need to use HDR in Lightroom.) RC teaches you how to set the camera up for bracketing and how HDR software works (in Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.) Apply your own creative aesthetic once you nail down these basics and you'll thank him, too.
Wayne
Just what I was looking for. Basics of what HDR is and the basic steps to do it. I do not care yet about making it realistic or not. I can get into advanced features later, but I am strongly leaning towards non-natural, more impressionistic, looks.
Student Work
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Adobe Photoshop