One of my most popular photos and one I get most questions about is that of the St. Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest.

It was made with real HDR technique, for which I used 5 bracketed photos. HDR is virtually unavoidable in circumstances where you want strong lights and deep shadows to be equally visible in the picture. This is especially true of building interior photos.
The point of HDR is to increase the bit depth (and thus the dynamic range) of photos with different exposure values into one single file, which is then tone mapped in order to achieve the final result. HDR merging and tone mapping is usually done with designated software, such as Photomatix or Dynamic Photo HDR (I use the latter), but can also be done in Photoshop.
For the Bazilika image I put the camera on a tripod, lens pointing upwards to the huge dome. I always use my camera with full manual settings. Here the exposure values were ISO100 and f/16. I then manually adjusted the shutter speed between 1 and 20 seconds to achive the 5 exposures ranging from -2 to +2 EV.  Taking 5 photos in stead of the usual 3 that the camera’s built-in auto bracketing function will allow will get you smoother, more detailed HDR photos. I sometimes take as many as 9 bracketed shots for a single HDR - a tripod is, of course, necessary.

I shoot in RAW, but I usually convert the photos before loading them into the HDR software.  There the tone mapping process will define the end result - whether it will have the ‘overdone’ look or a more natural appearance is totally up to you. If a natural look is desired, the most important setting is the ‘Light Smoothing’ (Photomatix) and the ‘Dramatic Light Range’ (Dynamic Photo HDR).  Here I went for the natural version. To eliminate the greyish tint often caused by the tone mapping process, I also ran the photo through Photoshop, tweaking the color balance a bit to restore the original colors seen inside the church.

A useful tip for your HDR photos is to run them through the Auto Level function in PS - this has a surprisingly good way of removing your usual tone mapping errors, such as loss of contrast and funny color balance.

Finally, here are three of the 5 original shots used for the final photo and the tone mapped, non-photoshopped result:

This entry was posted on hétfő, július 6th, 2009 at 20:58 and is filed under English, Technique, The Making Of... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.