Hope you appreciated my tuto about black and white processing with lightroom? Feedback about it were good so thank you!
I'm now going to show you how to make an hdr black and white photo with the photomatix plugin of lightroom. If you didn't already read it, I suggest you to follow this link and read these few words about the HDR technic, just in order to clearly understand what will happen here.
We are going to see two ways to produce a HDR photo. First, from three photos (or more,with different exposures) taken with braketing method (Tuto 3: Braketing for HDR photo). Then, from a unique photo that we duplicate with different exposures (here, the RAW format is highly recommended).
Note that a video is available at the bottom of the page for a live demonstration.
If you're done with that, let's go to the next step!
Things you need
You'll need to have two software installed on your computer: Lightroom and Photomatix. First thing you shall verify is if your photomatix plugin is correctly detected and enabled on Lightroom. You can check that on your Lightroom plugin manager:
If you want to do HDR from a unique photo, you must capture it with the RAW format, in order to duplicate it and modify the exposure without altering the photo quality.
If you want to do HDR from the three photos you took with braketing, the need of RAW files is not really true because if Lightroom can handle RAW files, Photomatix can't (and will convert RAW files into JPEG). In the case you have RAW files, I suggest you to convert them in JPEG using Lightroom instead of Photomatix (the result will be a bit better), we'll see it just after.
The objective
Let's imagine you wanted to take a photo of a beautiful railway, with a wide-angle lens, in difficult conditions (typically, high variety of contrasts and brightness). It will be difficult to do the perfect shoot in just one photo.
For this first part, we'll see how to obtain from this three braketed images (click to enlarge):
Under-exposure Average-exposure Over-exposure
A correctly exposed HDR photo that we will then convert in black and white:
Just a note about braketed photos: I use a Nikon D7000 that allows me to braket only three photos. EV increment can be of 0.3, 0.7, 1.0, 1.3, 1.7 and 2.0.
In most cases, I use braketing to get three photos with increment of 2EV which was good on all situation I met. It's up to you to know what is possible with your stuff!
First step: Import files on Lightroom
Let's imagine that your three braketed photos are in RAW format. First thing you have to do is to import them on Lightroom. There is no adjustment to do right now, just maybe apply a lens correction profil to your three photos. For example:
Step 2: Convert RAW into JPEG with Lightroom
As said before, it is much better to converte RAW files in JPEG with Lightroom. To do so, make a selection of your three bracketed photos (ctrl+click), and choose "export":
I then select the JPEG format and use the maximum quality setting. Click export to convert your RAW files into JPEG:
Step 3: Import JPEG files into Photomatix
We are now going to import our three jpeg files into Photomatix. Just select them in lightroom (ctrl+click, again), and choose "export -> photomatix":
The following window appears. We want to make one photo from three, they would better be aligned. To be sure of that, I tell photomatix to align images and crop aligned result. I also ask it to automatically re-import the HDR result into lightroom in JPEG format. Click "Export" to go to Photomatix:
Step 4: HDR adjustments with Photomatix
Photomatix opened itself and shows an overview of our future HDR photo. You can notice the main Photomatix adjustment menu on the left and a histogram next to it:
Here are the main settings I usually adjust (up to you to play with others :):
Strength: My goal is to get an HDR looking natural. After several tries I understood that this parameter had to be at its maximum (100).
Color saturation: Adjust it at your convenience, I always try not to over-saturate colors here.
Luminosity: Same thing here, play with it till it's good for you.
Microcontrast: Modify the overall contrast of the scene. To the left for a painting aspect, to the right for a most natural looking aspect.
Smoothing: It allows to play with the exposition of the HDR image on different zones according to original imported JPEGs. Adjust it with caution in order to give maximum harmony to your photo!
White/black Point: Adjust them in order to avoid under and over-exposition on your image (refer to the histogram and make sure there is no overflow on the right or the left of it).
If you're done with adjusments, just click "save and re-import". The final HDR image is directly imported on Lightroom. You can work on it like on any other photo. So, for a black and white conversion, you can refer to the first tutorial for black and white processing with Lightroom. Here is the kind of result you'll be able to get:
Step 5: HDR From a unique RAW file
In the case you couldn't do braketing to get different exposures for a same photo, it will be possible to get approximately the same result from a unique RAW file of your photo.
Here is the idea: Lightroom allows to do virtual copy of a file. So, if your original RAW file is on a average exposure, you'll be able to do two virtual copy of it and modify their own exposure with Lightroom (on development mode): one will be the over-exposed file (for example, +2 on exposition), the other one the under-exposed one (-2). To do a virtual copy, just select your RAW file and choose "create virtual copy":
At this state it's like if you just did three photos with braketing. You can go back to Step 2 of this tutorial to continu your HDR processing.
Video Example
Here is a video example I made to illustrate this tutorial. I just followed step by step what I explained here (with just few variations).
Here is the result I get from that video (after few more tweaks on lightroom):
Damien
