HDR = High Dynamic Range. If you enter HDR in youtube you can find many tutorials, it's easy. I just took this a couple hours ago: Image Unavailable, Please Login
How much $ do they want before the S/W doesn't put those watermarks in the image? Cheers, Ian EDIT: Nice pic BTW.
Ian, they have several bundles http://www.hdrsoft.com/ I tried the software demo some time back a few years ago and it was ok. Not sure how drastic the improvements have been but you might be able to replicate this in newer versions of Adobe CS. If you look online, I'm sure you could easily find the how-to. And yes, it's best with a tripod since it brackets the shots essentially and combines them in layers. I haven't done much photog recently so I'm way behind the curve (no pun intended).
It's not essential really (although it does/can reduce the amount of post processing). Probably half of my HDR is done without a tripod.
A phantastic picture that is spoiled by the watermarks There has to be cheap or free HDR software out there...
the problem with HDR is 95% of what I've seen looks fantastically horrible. What do I mean? It looks fake. I don't like fake... thats just my view though.
Most of CS-era Photoshop software has a "merge to HDR" function.. And I agree that it does look fake at times, but I think we're fooling ourselves if we're talking about going for absolute realism with every shot. Used in the right way (and sparingly.. I've seen entire homes shot in HDR?) it can be a great addition to a series.
So *that* comment got me asking "how about The Gimp?".... Seems that you need the *wonderfully* named "qtpfsgui" add-in and you're good to go. Cheers, Ian
I'm not big into HDR, but am familiar with it. I believe that the main attraction of HDRsoft's package (photomatix) isn't the merging of multiple exposures (i.e. 'HDR'), but rather the tonemapping (which is what gives many photos their dramatic look). Yes, you can use the batch function in CS (I think starting at 2) to layer your photos and get an HDR image, but there is no tonemapping functionality to speak of. I'm surprised they didn't add something into CS5 given the current level of interest. I think you misunderstood ian's post. He was talking about The Gimp (freeware), not Photoshop.
Very interesting! The (very brief) research I did that turned up "qtpfsgui" (WTF?) suggested tonemapping was what it was all about..... Indeed. It got installed as part of a recent Ubuntu install I did - I'm lovin' it Cheers, Ian