Lessons

Lesson Info

Library Module: HDR

Now let's, move away from the developed module and let's start looking at the library macho cause there's a bunch of new stuff in there and some of it's great for stuff. This is what I looked like when I first started teaching photo shop first light room is available that's the last time I wore a tie other than it like a funeral or a halloween or a wedding or similar things, I just happen to have that in there. So I think things that I find to be great in the library module when I'm out shooting mid day, I find that my camera is not very great capturing what I see, I get to a particular scene and this is what I see with my eyes, it's just a normal scene. I'm just looking up here, I think I'm in cambodia looking about the sky, I can easily see the detail in the sky can easily see the details of my surrounding and it feels rather natural when I see that, but I pick up my camera and I pointed at the exact same scene and I get this or this or this or this, I have all these choices on what ...

I could get except for that one that's that's one that's been processed, but I can't get it where I can see it like my eyes do the problem with that is that I have an optical viewfinder on my camera when I look through my camera's viewfinder, I see this, but when I take the picture, I don't see that if I have a marylise camera where it has a video screen that I'm looking at instead of scene the view out the lens I know ahead of time that I'm only going to get this where I have less detail my shadows and highlight because I can actually see that and result in the viewfinder if I want to look more like my eyes see here I need to capture hdr in order to do hdr what I need to do and I'll use a simpler image for this is first I need to capture dark image doesn't need to be overly dark it just needs to be dark enough to capture the brightest portion of the image and so what I want in the darkest image he is on my camera screen I want no white when I review that image and you can set up your camera so that if anything is solid white that blinks on the screen I call it the blink ease if some people call it the highlight warning or other things and I want to make sure there's nothing that would be blinking here unless it's something that's so bright that it would hurt my eyes to look at it directly and that would be the noonday sun or an extremely bright light source that'd be okay if those areas were blown out then I'm usually gonna take another shot that is about two stops brighter and then another shot about two stops writer again in sometimes I need to take even more than those three shots but if you're shooting under midday sun outdoors usually those three shots would be fine if you want to know how to tell if you need more than three shots which you want to do is after you've taken your pictures review them make sure that the darkest one you got your highlight detail nothing's white in it then look at the brightest one and just ask yourself is it easy to see what's in the dark part of the picture if the answer is no and what's in that dark part of the picture is important you should take more shots take another one two stops brighter and look at that one and say can you easily see what's in the dark part of the picture if the answer is no taken additional one two stops brighter until you can easily see what's in the dark part of the picture in the time of that will happen is when you're indoors and you can see out the window the difference between the extremely bright area outside the window and the relatively dark interior will dictate that you need more than three shots so I'm going to select these three photographs I'm going to then go to the photo menu go down here to photo merge and I'm gonna usually find a choice called hdr, which is great out at the moment taking a moment to figure out why you like these to see it's great out usually it's not great out and I'll have to figure out here briefly why this is, um let's see are these only smart previews? I don't have the originals for those shots, so let me quickly find somewhere I do either this hard drive got disconnected just now, which has usually the originals on it or something else, but I'm don't have time to troubleshoot that so let's just quickly find some other hdr images that I can quickly access wouldn't that be nice? I'm just going to click here and see if oh no taking a moment to look is not currently ceo of the original sorry I had these images with me there on the drive that's sitting here and ah light room doesn't want to show them to me who all my photos are missing let me quickly see if the drive is disconnected or if light room is just thinking about it differently though I know what it is take me a moment I have images on this drive over here it will take me a moment to get to them what's happening right now is I do restart my computer right before we started here and in the process of doing that light room ended up opening my normal catalogue the catalog I worked with day to day well, I made a special catalog for this particular course which copied pictures to this drive and that catalog is not currently open, so I'm gonna open that catalog and in the process of doing so it's going to know that these are sitting here I have a question about exactly like I had a catalogue and I lost all my even just like you lost them right now but I didn't start and when I started still lost we can like restore it and okay get work again we just got the look. Ok, well, the first couple things on occasion you can find that light room seems to have lost its knowledge of where your images are hiding and usually that's because you did something outside of light room and that means that most the time it has to do with let's say you bought a new hard drive and in the process of buying a new hard drive you moved your images there but in moving your images you did not do it from within light room you just want your operating system you said I'm going to drag this folder from here to there that's one time it would happen, and then you launched light room in light room just doesn't know that that happened in the on ly way light room keeps track of where your pictures are are based on where they were stored on your hard drive and suddenly that's different, and it goes to look for them and doesn't see them. So if that's the case what you'll find, in fact I'll have that right now if I go to here right, here are a bunch of folders and you see these question marks that means he doesn't know where these folders are they're not sitting where they used to be, and that often means either the hard drive is not attached that has those images and you just need to connect the hard drive or if I've moved those images, what I need to do is right click on it and there's a choice called find missing folder and if I choose, find missing folder I just need a pointed at where I've moved that folder too, and if I do and I confined the folder of the same name and just pointed out where I moved it to, then the question mark will go away and it will know where that particular folder is now located now, one thing that can become an issue is if if you moved a lot of folders like let's say an entire hard drive he used to have three separate little hard drives you combine them all into one big hard drive and when you go through your folder leo's do you go here like to mine in two thousand fifteen and you have this number of folders that are not found and you usually have to right click on every single one to tell it where it isthe well, what I would do is there's a little trick the tricks already been done in this case let me see but what it is is if he right click, there will be a choice called either show parent folder or hide parent folder and what that means is usually it just tells me the name of my drive here and then has the folders that contained within it and you can't go up here in right click on the name of the drive and say show me where I move this drive to I might have copied it to another drive, so you right click on it and there would be a choice called show parent folder. Let me see if I can do it here show parent folder because usually only shows you the folder you've important in the light room it doesn't show you this the path it would take to get to that folder, but if I right click here and say show parents holder instead of just showing desktop now it shows what desktop is contained within, which can be the name of your drive. I can then right click on the name of that drive and choose um intel it where I've moved them to. So if I've consolidated them onto another drive, I could pointed out that drive, and suddenly it would realize that all the folders air there. But let me quickly switched to another catalog so that all my images are actually there in things work my drives called little zip because it's an ssd drive, which means it's a fast dr, uh and it's a nice, tiny little one. If you like these drives, they're not overly easy to find online have to search for because these are hidden on the manufacturer's web site, but this is called a o w, c and it's called the, uh, envoy pro and that's what I use when I'm traveling out shooting I used two of these this is four hundred eighty gigs and it's a very fast drive it's not like a normal spinning hard drive. It's the more modern stop. All right now, let's, see, now that I've opened that other catalogue, if this will participate and do what I expected to yeah, it says my original pictures of there, so here I have my three images now if I go to the photo menu and I choose photo emerged, it won't be great out anymore there's a choice here called hdr, which is new in light room c c and by choosing hdr it's going to combine those three images together and it'll take a little while to make a preview while it does let's look at the choices on the right side auto a line is going to try to line up these pictures using the same general technology would use to try to stitch a panorama, and that means you can shoot handheld, and if your camera moved a little bit between exposures, it'll be okay. It'll end up lining them up, then there's a check box here called auto tone because with default settings it's not going to optimize the image and so you might find that still your highlights look overly blown out and your shadows look really clogged up. Turning on auto tone will just move the adjustment sliders foryou similar to hitting the auto button when we're in the, uh develop module just to give you a better sense for what your image might look like when you're done and then down here we have a choice called de ghost amount if there was any movement in your scene let's say there was a flag flapping in the wind or there's a person running across the scene? Well, if you take more than one exposure, whatever that is that was moving will be in a different position in each shot and it's here with d ghost amount will try to deal with that it will try to find where the motion wass and on ly use that object from one of the three shots that you have instead of combining all three together in that area in there's a check box at the bottoms called shou d ghost overlay and in this particular image I don't know that it's going to show much because there wasn't really motion in the scene but if you turn this on, it would put red on top of the picture where thinks there was motion so let's say there was a river with the water in motion or a waterfall? Uh if I turned on shou d ghost overlay and only a small portion of the waterfall got covered in red and I knew there was a lot more emotion in a larger area of the picture, then over here on the right side I could push this up to medium or high and it would work in a larger and larger area and I could push that up and tell the overlay covered the entire air that was in motion if there's no motion in there, you're welcome to also choose none then I'm going to hit the merge button and when I do it's going to start combining these three images together, the end result will be a d n g file in that is special because it means it's still a raw file and that's unlike any other program that merges multiple images together to make an hdr image, there are special qualities of a raw file in one of those qualities is the ability to change the white balance setting to compensate for different colors of light without degrading the quality of your picture at all and there are other advantages, but this is just going to be more versatile then it would happen in other programs. Once you get that image you compress indeed to go to the developed module and then you can optimize your picture you'll find the sliders or not zeroed out to their default settings because remember there was a check box called auto tone. If I hit the reset button in the lower right it would reset all the sliders and it would look just like it did in the emerging dialog box without the auto tone checkbox stern on. But most the time with hdr image is what I do is I end up moving this shadow slider all the way up, moving the highlight slider all the way down and then adjusting exposure to get the general brightness level that I want and afterwards, I just the image like any other image I've ever run into use the slider said he usually would, so I might come in here and see if contrast needs to be adjusted either lowered or increased. If I lower it anytime I lower contrast, I almost always boost clarity because image looks rather dull anytime you end up lowering contrast, bringing clarity up is going to bring back some of the pop that was in the image before I can adjust white balance in the quality does not go down as they do, which is very nice, because in other hdr programs, it's very important to adjust the images ahead of time before you end up merging them, because a lot of things would be exaggerated in the process of merging, and those things would be like chromatic aberrations, which are little halos around the edges of objects little reddish in green, isha lines well in here since it's still a raw filed those are things that don't get exaggerated in the process of doing this because we can change them afterwards. There's no quality difference here's a little tip, though if you do hdr a lot, which I do, I find that going is selecting my image is going up to the photo menu in choosing hdr and waiting for that dialogue box to show up. And then having to hit merged takes too much time. What if I have fifteen or twenty hdr images that I need to get done today? And I don't want to sit there and manually do every single one? Well, check this out if you go to the photo menu, you have the choice here called hdr noticed there's, a keyboard shortcut listed if you're not used to this little symbol here that indicates the control key, so control age would do hdr, so I just type control age. It will take these images and start sending them into this dialog box, but I have to wait for this preview. Do you see the merge button is great out right now? It's going to be great out until it's done, making that preview and let's just see how long that's going to take if I need to do fifteen images, how much of my time is going to be sitting here staring out of progress bar? I don't want it to be that way, so I'm going to click the cancel button and here's a tip if you did control h r h p r, it would do the same thing send you into that dialog box, but if you add the shifty, it means do it in the background and just used the last settings that I applied to a picture so you want emerge one set of hdr images to decide what kind of settings do you want for the dig? O'steen? What kind of settings do you want for? It should be auto toned or not whatever it would be in that dialogue box, but then when you need to do another set, just select the images into shift control each and then go to your next set of images that you want to ah merge let's say I'm going to merge these I do shift control each and look at what we have if he go up here two operations in progress and if you mouse over them can click here, it'll tell you oh it's creating an hdr image is doing another one at the same time it's doing to at the same time I can cancel either one by hitting a little x that's here, but I could sit there and just go through a folder, select another sequence shift control h and then go the next sequence of images shift control. H and I could have eight nine of these things emerging at the same time and then I go get a coffee or are I can go in here and continue adjusting picture I could just go in here and I could be adjusting this image while it's in the background doing that merging for me so for me, that saves a lot of time where I don't have to wait for the hdr dialog box to generate a preview before I could hit the merge button. I only do that once to determine the settings that are used, and then I used the keyboard shark it along with shift when I'm done in this little progress, bar's is done. I'll just find that the images will be sitting in this folder already to be adjusted and that save a tremendous amount of time. But your question, if you wanna difference stating for age they are, you need to do forthis sitting for regular way, and then if you want us to say, if you want a different setting within that merging dialog box, you'd have to manually go into it, set it up the way you want, and then if he had five more images that need the exact same settings that's when you use the keyboard shark it but any time you need deviate let's, say there's, a lot of motion in the scene there is that flag flapping in this particular one. Then I would take that one, and instead of using the keyboard sharks kind of do it manually and only if I had five more images that also had a flag flapping in them. Then I could use the keyboard shortcut after that is just the first one establishes the settings that will be used. And so if you need the settings to be different on the first one of each, you know siri's of images that need a different setting. You have do it manually. Yeah, emotion. One of the things I like to shoot his waterfalls and doing hdr. Sometimes there will be a rush or something moving in the wind. Can that feature be used to stop the motion of the of the brush without ruining the water? Well, it depends on the image, because the problem is sometimes, though, the waterfall you want to have you want to use the part of the waterfall that was from the longest exposure, because you get the silky look that a lot of people like in the waterfall, but at the same time that's the exposure that caused the the leaves and things that might be overlapping the waterfall to be in motion because he had a long exposure in there. You want to use the short exposure for for that, and they might not be the it might not be able to figure out the ideal way to do that it's not intelligent enough to know that those air leaves in things so you can try it with this, but you're always going to want to be critical of it zoom up and seed wasn't able to truly correct for it other times would I'll end up doing a shooting the waterfall twice and I'll actually change my eyes so setting because by doing my eyes so setting I can get the same exposure your same brightness in the image with a much shorter or longer shutter speed and I'll have to tow layer them one on top of the other and paint in yeah, but sometimes it can deal with it it's just it's going to be hit or miss as faras if it can handle that or not. What was the setting that you liked if you did have a lot of motion if you had a lot of motion, it was a a uh it was like none or I'll show you got let let let me just grab these images and go to him right over here d ghost amount. So what you want to do is if you have motion in your image, make sure this is not set to none instead go to these choices in here and turn on the little check boss called shou d ghost overlay and it's going to put red on top your image where it thinks there was motion and if you find there's not enough red, meaning it's not covering up all the motion, then pushed this to a higher setting until the red covers up all the areas that had motion problems. So that's the setting there.