HDR Photography: set up and process your first high dynamic range image

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4 options to make your high dynamic range image

There are several ways to merge your images for an HDR photography effect. Here are four of the best…

Nik HDR Efex Pro 2

Price: £80, $100
Nik’s HDR Efex Pro 2 is an intuitive, fast and simple-to-use piece of HDR software. There’s a great set of presets, which are perfect as a starting point, especially if you’re new to creating HDR images. Good end results are easy to achieve.
Get it from Nik Software

Adobe Photoshop CS6, Merge to HDR Pro

Price: £660, $699
Photoshop’s Merge to HDR Pro feature can be used to create pretty good looking HDR images, but you do have to work really hard to get anything that looks halfway decent. The presets are utterly ghastly too.
Get it from Adobe

Photomatix Pro

Price: £62, $99
You can get wonderful results from Photomatix Pro, and many pros love it. However, the user interface is rather clunky and takes some getting used to. The preset options are pretty crude, too, which makes this method less useful for beginners.
Get it from HDR Soft

Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 Layer Masking

Price: £79, $100
While this method isn’t a true HDR treatment, you can use Layer Masks to blend several exposures to create an image with a full range of tones. You can do this easily in Photoshop Elements. It arguably creates the best results.
Get it from Adobe

Posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2012 at 11:30 am under Photography Tutorials, Tutorials.