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Creating HDR using Photoshop & Photomatix Pro

Mo J. Al-Mughrabi under Photography

My first Sharm El Sheikh - HDR

Creating HDR is not as hard as it sound but once you find the proper tool, image and with little practice it becomes a piece of cake. In the past few months I read bunch of tutorials on how to generate HDR photos and all of them were so useful and helpful to get me learning the techniques and pick up my own tools.

First you must pick the proper photo to work with, because from my point of view not every picture can look good HDRed. Second, you will need Adobe Photoshop and PhotoMatix Pro both tool available for windows and Mac based operating systems.

Step 1

Copy the photo into a separate folder and open with Photoshop. Go to Exposure (from Image->Adjustments->Exposure..) put the exposure for 1.50 and save with a different name not to overwrite the original one. Now, open the original image again and go to exposure and assign the exposure value to -1.50 and save as a different name not to overwrite original plus the over exposed version you did earlier.

Output of step 1

Step 2

Open PhotoMatix Pro and go to "Generate HDR Image", browse and pick the two images you made earlier plus the original one. Click OK and use the default settings and Photomatix should take care of everything. Click on Tone Mapping and adjust the light smoothing, colors and all the rest to meet what you looking for in an HDR.

This is the simplest way I could find for generating HDR's, off course many thanks to Suaod for the tips.

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  1. Mohamed Anwar Said,

    Dear Mohamed,

    I really appreciate your efforts in collecting such useful informations & tips
    But I just wanna ask about something. Creating HDR photos as you said seems to be more complicated than you’ve explained. So, my question is what could be added to that explained technique to make it better

    Also, I wanna ask about the types of photos that could be HDRed from your point of view

    Thanks in advance, Keep it up man …………

  2. Mo J. Al-Mughrabi Said,

    Yeah, I didn’t know the photo would come out like this myself… I just followed a manual and i missed couple steps but it came out like this. Its very simple, you just drag three photos in the photomatix and generate the HDR..

    from what I saw so far, I think HDR goes very well with a pictures with landscapes, clouds and sun lights.. you should definitely try it some time…

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