CG - HDR stuff

Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2008 2:27 pm Post subject: CG - HDR stuff

Hey CG...

I was messing with my camera today (a pretty old Olympus digital) and found that it has a mode that will let you do that HDR stuff. Given that you have a much better and newer camera, I'm betting yours has this too.

Look in the manual and check for a setting you can use via the menus on the camera for "drive". This tells the camera whether you want to save each picture to the memory card between each shot, or take multiple shots and then save them all at once. If you set this to 5, it will take five shots (bam, bam, bam, bam, bam) as fast as it can when you hold down the shutter button, then stop and save them all as separate shots to the memory card.

So this is a nice feature in and of itself, but there is another setting under "drive" called "bracket". This will again take xx shots as fast as possible, saving them all at once when done (hold down the shutter until it's done snapping the pics), but will also automatically "bracket" the exposure settings (aperture and shutter speeds) with xx different settings. So it will take xx (mine goes up to 10) shots with each one set to a sliding scale of exposure setting from brighter to darker and shorter to longer focal point.

Then you take these pics and using Photoshop CS3, use "file / automate / import to HDR" and it will combine them (trying to line up the content properly if you do it hand held) and use HDR "merge" to create a new single image that is a composite of all of them. It works pretty neat.

See if your camera doesn't support this. I'm betting it does. Than we just need to get CS3 working for you.

Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2008 4:43 pm Post subject:

Here is a quick example. Not great, since it's not a particularly interesting subject and I didn't use a tripod (so there is some loss of clarity due to my hands moving, but kinda shows what it can do.

Here are the five pics I took in "bracket" mode with the camera:

And here is the result:

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Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:11 pm Post subject:

One thing I have found is that you really HAVE to use a tripod. You just can't stop your hands from moving while it snaps the 5 pictures, and although PS tries to line them up by detecting edges and such, it still comes out with some loss of clarity (blurring). With a tripod it should be crystal clear.

Still need to play around with some camera settings like "film speed" (ASA) and such to see what kind of results I can get.
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Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2008 6:42 pm Post subject:

Hmmm... I will have to dig out my manual.

Thanks for posting. Smile

I really do want to to give this a try.

Very neat. Very Happy

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