Above, I have five images exposed for HDR. That means one properly exposed image and one to two over- and under-exposed images. The images are of a tree showing off its fall foliage:
Open the Dynamic Photo HDR program. You can get a free trial version on their web site.
Go to the File menu and bring in the images that you want. This is what it looks like:
A dialog box opens up called Create New HDR Image. Click OK:
The next dialog box asks to “Align Files”. Click on each image and use the dials to align them. Even if the images don’t need aligning, click on each image or the program won’t let you go to the next step. Then click OK:
This next step will take a few moments while the program creates the HDR image:
Here, you can correct the exposure and gamma by moving the sliders:
Now it’s time to click on Step 2 – Tone map HDR file:
Here the “Tone Mapping” dialog box opens up. Go to the left side of the box where it says “Method”. Check out which one you like best. Then go to Setting. This is where you can tweak the brightness, shadow/highlights, saturation and radius. On the right of the box there are the curves, color equalizer and the hue shift:
If you want more options, you can click on the Kelvin tab, which brings up this dialog box. There are a lot to choose from. The thing I don’t care for is that the boxes are too small, and there is no way to make them bigger:
Then there’s the Match Color tab. Another cool feature, but again the boxes are too small:
When you’re happy with the way your image looks, click Process. This will take a few moments. You can see the blue line going across as the image gets processed. When it’s done, your computer will ask you which folder you’d like to save your image in, and to name your image:
The program won’t close, or even seem like anything happened. You should check the folder where you saved the file before closing the program.
There are a lot of different features in this program. I’m still learning them, myself. This is just another HDR option for your creativity.
Here’s the finished image:
Don’t forget to download your free trial version to check it out. Enjoy!