HDR Cookbook – Introduction

Welcome to my little HDR Cookbook. This is a collection of recipes for processing photos, in particular HDR photos. In the menu at the right side, you see all the sections that are currently available (not too many yet as I am adding them incrementally, and I have only just started).

About Me

I started posting my photos on www.flickr.com in February 2010. At that time, I was taking photos seriously for about a year. Being a fan of a specific technique called HDR, I got particularly interested in post-processing since most HDR photos only just become an eye-catcher once you run them through a series of processing steps in your favorite photo editing tool.

Some people on flickr share information about how they created and processed their photos, and I enjoyed this information almost as much as viewing the resulting masterpieces. They offer a very good opportunity for learning new techniques and comparing your own techniques against those of others. Consequently, I also started offering detailed information on everything I do to a picture – not only because it adds some honesty to the photographic medium but also because my experience is that sharing information is the best way of getting feedback and engaging in discussions.

However, flickr and other photo sharing platforms do not really offer a lot of space for such information. Since some of the things I do to photos are somewhat complex, the information I am able to provide for each photo directly is only a coarse summary. Thankfully,  the other great photographers in flickr enjoy my work and I start getting a number of individual messages asking for advice and more detailed information on my techniques. Hence, it is a logical consequence to share such information with a broader public using other means.

So here you are in my HDR Cookbook! The purpose of this Blog is to share this information with anyone who is interested! Don’t get me wrong here. This is not my way of expressing that I am a master of photography or any better than, for example, you. I am not! My path has not been too long yet, I am still learning a lot every day. But I discovered that there are masses of people just like me who may find this information interesting and helpful.

How this Cookbook is Structured

This Blog is set up like a Cookbook. It contains a number of recipes for achieving different results and effects in your photos. All the tutorials are based on Photoshop CS4. Enjoy the information and comment if you have feedback or different opinions. This is a collection of living documents. It is probably never complete or finished. I will add new information as I discover new techniques or improve existing ones.

What this Cookbook is not

You will not find any lengthy explanations on how to shoot HDR images (setting exposure, autobracketing, camera settings etc). You can find tons of web pages explaining these things. I may include a list of the most useful pages in a future version.

What You Need to Cook with Me

I will not give you instructions on how to use 10 different alternative software tools (e.g. Photoshop and GIMP). I have found my own little collection of tools that does the job for me, and I am going to refer specifically to these tools. Having said that, however, these are the most widely used tools for this kind of work. You may also find that some of the techniques can be easily transferred to other (possibly free) tools.

I use the following software:

1. Photomatix Pro (currently Version 4.0)
2. Topaz Photoshop Bundle: This is a suite of different Photoshop filters that comes in very handy in a lot of occasions. You can download a test version for free, and the full version comes at an affordable cost. I heavily use Topaz Adjust, Topaz Denoise and Topaz ReMask. Some other filters are used occasionally.
3. Photoshop CS4
4. Geosetter – for geotagging
5. exiftool – for copying EXIF data from one image to another included in Geosetter

Furthermore, the following hardware is used:

1. Windows PC:
   1. 4 cores with 2,8 GHz
   2. 8 GB of memory (Photoshop eats up to 4,5 GB)
   3. Windows 7 64 bit
2. Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet: This is a very important tool. Doing serious image editing with a mouse is not possible. We will be literally painting on the image (for masking and other tasks). If you enjoy the kind of post-processing discussed here, get a graphics tablet! It does not need to be big and expensive.

Do I Really Need All This Stuff???

Not necessarily! This cookbook explains a lot of principles that may also be applied using other hardware and software.

What’s Next?

If you are new to my cookbook, I suggest that you start reading about The General HDR Workflow first, or start with the overview page that categorizes the recipes and gives brief descriptions of each recipe. If you scroll up the start of the page again, you will also find a small menu on the right side listing all the sections in a useful order. You can start exploring the site from there.

Cheers and have fun!