After posting a couple hot rod images last week, I received a ton of great email. No, I’m not venturing into car photography (I get my speed fix from aviation). Yes, these are all HDR images at the start. While I did “car” photography in my youth, that’s specialty is for other youthful hearts to prusue. And why did I shoot these photos on a rainy, overcast day using HDR? This is a VERY valid and I think important question. Many went further and asked how did I do what my bud Scott Kelby calls “realistic” HDR? Let’s back engineer this and see if this short answer helps (the long answer and technique will be gone through at our Photoshop for Shooters class). What you see is NOT the image coming out of Photomatix Pro. What you see here is the FINISHED photo coming from Photoshop. Photography is a game of subtleties and when it comes to a tool to work subtleties, I still feel PS is #1. Here are the layers in finishing this one photo.
And these aren’t all the layers that were used because some are created, used and then discarded after samples are created and retained. You might be asking then why did I use HDR if I did all this work in Photoshop (keep in mind it took just under two minutes to finish this images in PS)? The answer is to get a photograph that looks exactly as my MEMORY remembers that moment in time. Don’t get confused here, I said how my memory remembers the moment, not exactly how it was in reality. This is where the PHOTOGRAPHER must come into play in the FINISHING of the photograph in post. Without that guiding light, that of photography, finishing in post is just a movement of sliders praying one will make a difference one likes. OK, if you follow my drift this far, let’s keep pushing it forward.
There is no way even during a nuclear night could you miss these candle apple red beauts! They are practically neon and glow even though it’s raining and our eyes and brain latch onto that color and even though it needs no help, the brain enhances those colors. That poor bastard, the camera though doesn’t function that way, it’s all math and it says simply, the light is blue/gray and that’s that! You can switch to Vivid, under or overexpose, all the in camera techniques available and no matter what you do, the light is the light and the camera is the camera and the color will never be out of the camera that neon flaming candy apple red that is seared into our memory. So the goal for me at least was not to match reality, but the memory which is so much more vivid!
What photographic tool do we have that punches up colors? HDR! How does it do that even though it’s created by the same camera that wants to turn this color into gray/blue? In this case, I shot a 5 image bracket because that grabbed all the highlights and shading in the RED bodies needed to match my MEMORY. It really requires no major brain lift on our part other then knowing LIGHT, looking at its deficiencies and then shooting accordingly. In this case, knowing what the SUBJECT was, it was real simple. HDR! The light issue was not quantity but quality and HDR can at times make up for that lack of quality.
And to be honest with you, these are not really “realistic” but rather a match to my memory which is anything but accurate. And then I take it a step further but I’m getting ahead of myself. How do I create the “realistic” HDR in post? Boring answer coming…..I just use the Tone Mapping defaults in Photomatix Pro. Yeap, that’s it. But as you can see in the layers above, that’s not enough. Photomatix is doing the heavy lifting bringing out the color in the hot rods, I have to do the rest in Photoshop. In the image above, that includes repairing a dent in the front grill, build a barn door on the right to hide a white frig and remove another photographer on the left. In the top image, I had to remove a banner on the right barn door (this all took less then 2 min to do). In the top image I still had to use Color Efex Pro Tonal Contrast to make the neon sign neon but nowhere in the process did I go to what I call “Elvis on Velvet” but rather, used the camera, Photomatix Pro and Photoshop to simply create an image that matched my memory. Now if this process, logic or techniques interests you, we have a class now so you can learn, master and more importantly, use all of these tools and more so your photographs match YOUR memory!
Photos captured by D3x, 70-200VR2 on Lexar UDMA digital film