HDR Experiments and RAWs for download

I'm far from a professional photographer, I'm more of an enthusiast and I love to play around with my Canon G9. It's not an SLR camera but it works really fine for my skills and, also, it does RAW; everything I need for my addiction to HDR. I still have a lot to learn but I thought it would be nice to share some of my experiments.

For this short tutorial I will use Photomatix but you can use whatever software you like. The RAW file used will be available and I think it would be great if more readers shared their results here. To do that just leave a comment with the final image and a comment explaining how you did it.

Winners of the Essential HDR giveaway

• Crazyhunk
• Yann

Step 1

I'm not an expert and I'm always searching for the best ways to improve my photo and HDR skills. I have to thank Cameron for the tips, he's really good and has helped me a lot.

As I had only one RAW file, I created 3 different images with different exposures: -3, 0,+3. You can do that in Photoshop, or any other tool. Save all the images in TIFF.

Step 2

Now in Photomatix, go to Process>Generate HDR. Select the 3 images and press OK.

Step 3

Change the Specify E.V spacing to 3 and press OK. Another dialog box will open, just press OK again. It asks you if you want Photomatix to align the images and other options, but as we are working with 3 different files from the same image that wont be a problem.

Step 4

When the HDR viewer opens just press Tone Mapping. To be honest I don't know what this part means, if anybody knows please leave a comment.

Step 5

Here is when the problems begin, the Tone Mapping. Actually in this part is where you adjust the settings to create the HDR. Below I list my adjustments.

Conclusion

After 30 minutes playing with the values I got a nice result. Maybe you can get a much better than mine, if so, share with us the values you use and the final image in a comment.

Download Files

Download some RAW files for this tutorial.