40D --> AEB combination

I've just received my 40d and I'm really not dissapointed of it except for one thing, shadow/highlight clipping. Problem I'm experiencing is that when I take a shot on something that has a high dynamic range, something which has low and high light area, either i get shadow or highlight clipping with the end result.

I tried AEB but I find it a bit useless since it just takes 3 shots at 3 different exposures (bracketing) so one of the shots will have under exposure, or over. For example look at this image:



As you can see, there is a lot of under and some over exposure as well, I tried the AEB function on the camera which takes 3 shots at 3 different exposures depending on the bracketing values but I never achieved a good result with that.

I was wondering, is it possible to make an AEB combination just like the writtin in the dpreview glossary regarding AEB -------> http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/Glossary/Exposure/Auto_Bracketing_01.htm

I think the step you are missing is that after the AEB you need to take the three files and mix them together in photoshop to get what we call a high dynamic range photo (HDR). That way you have the highlights (from the underexposed photo) and the shadow detail (from the overexposed photo).

The 3 shots have to be identical so a tripod is pretty useful, otherwise there is a bit of blur of camera movement between the images when you mix them.

Andrew

Grafdude said:

I've just received my 40d and I'm really not dissapointed of it
except for one thing, shadow/highlight clipping. Problem I'm
experiencing is that when I take a shot on something that has a high
dynamic range, something which has low and high light area, either i
get shadow or highlight clipping with the end result.

Click to expand...

First off, that shot is not an example of high dynamic range. It is EXTREME dynamic range and you will not find any camera that will be able to successfully expose for both the shadows and the highlights simultaneously.

As the other poster indicated, take multiple shots and combine them with the use of layer masks in order to get the desired final product. Take one exposed for the window, where everything else would be severely underexposed, and take another exposed for the rest of the area, in which the window would be greatly overexposed. Combine them in PS and use layer masks to mask out the under and over exposed areas in the two photos, such that only the properly exposed portions of each photo is visible in the final image.
--
-Larry
http://www.pbase.com/lardog

As Andrew indicated, you can combine them using HDR in Photoshop CS 3. An abbreviated description of how I do it is as follows:

Set your camera for AEB with a separation of 2 stops above and below. Best to use a tripod. Shoot in RAW (they need to be 16 bit images). If you use a tripod, you can take more than 3 exposures manually over a broader exposure range. For landscapes, wind is an enemy and can ruin your attempt.

Open your images in CS3 Bridge. Select the images you wish to combine. Go to the menu bar and click Tools> Photoshop> Merge to HDR. After a little wait, you will get your combined image. Save this image as a Radiance file. Open this file in a program called Photomatrix Pro 2.5.3 (you can download a free trial from their web site: http://www.hdrsoft.com/ ). Read their tutorial. Process your photo. Then you can reopen it in PS CS3 after your adjustments.

I know this is kind of complicated, but is exciting and fairly easy to use once you do it. Anyway, it has worked for me.
--
Tom Grollman

Thanks a lot for the advice, will experiment with this.

I've merged a series of test images with 3 different exposures, now I have an hdr in ps cs3 but how do I save it as a radiance file?

When you say radiance, do you mean save it as an hdr?

Click on Save As under the File menu heading. Choose Radiance under the Format pop-up menu.
--
Tom Grollman

Radiance is a file format alternative to Photoshop, TIFF, etc. formats. JPG is not a format choice for a 32 bit file.

I hope this answers your questions.
--
Tom Grollman

Thanks for the feedback Tom, I saved my hdr as a radiance and then opened it with photomatix, but I had better results merging the 3 raw's with photomatix and then playing around with tone mapping, so what are the benefits of merging them with ps?

Also, is there a similar software for merging raw's?

Has anyone tried the old film method of metering on the darks and metering on the light, and averaging the two, and then using manual to set the averaged settings ? Just wondered, as I often used this satisfactorily on my film camera when shooting slides in contrasty situations.

carolyn
--
Ranger a.k.a chammett
http://www.pbase.com/chammett

'elegance is simplicity'

Grafdude said:

Thanks for the feedback Tom, I saved my hdr as a radiance and then
opened it with photomatix, but I had better results merging the 3
raw's with photomatix and then playing around with tone mapping, so
what are the benefits of merging them with ps?

Click to expand...

I have not tried going directly to Photomatix. I will try this. However, i was very happy with the result going through PS.

Grafdude said:

Also, is there a similar software for merging raw's?

Click to expand...

i only have the expeience whit PS and Photomatix.

--
Tom Grollman

Try this. Haven't tried it myself yet, so I can't vouch for it's accuracy.

http://www.photocamel.com/forum/hdr-high-dynamic-range-photography/28455-hdr-tutorial.html

thanks for the great tip. I had no idea you could do this in CS3

That's the virtue of the live preview with live histogram on the 40D, you really don't have to do that since you can see the entire tonal range and where clipping might occur in the live histogram. That said, there are shots where clipping is unavoidable.

didn't know about the bridge/photoshop function

it works great! thank you!

faster then making layer masks etc.etc.

Great tutorial, thanks!

Now the only thing that troubles me is that, I need to makes some adjustements to my 3 raw files witihin adobe camera raw before importing them into photomatix, thing is that raw files are always left untouched (non-destructive) in ps, instead a seperate file is created (.xmp) that has all the camera raw corrections in that file.

Photomatix will not read that .xmp file, I saved my raw as a .dng file but seems like it won't embed the camera raw settings in the file because when I import it into photomatix I always get the untouched version of my raw's

I also tried making corrections with camera raw, saving them as a .tif and then importing them into photomatix but the images don't look the same, I seem to be losing a lot of quality here.

Any suggestions?