Hillarys Boat Harbour HDR #1.

Just for something different I thought it might be cool to have a play with creating HDR images.

HDR (high dynamic range) is a technique used to create photographs with a much higher dynamic range than a camera can produce - because our eyes can see a higher dynamic range than the sensor of a camera.  You've probably seen plenty of examples of HDR photos all over the web.

I started with a 3-shot sequence of the scene, exposed at 0, +2EV and -2EV (next time I'll try 5 shots).  Then in Photoshop CS6, I performed a Merge to HDR Pro and played around with the settings until I arrived at something I liked.  There were bits in the sky that I didn't like, so I took the 0 EV shot and painted back in some of the original colour of the sky.  A small amount of tweaking using NIK Software (Color Effex Pro and Viveza), and there you have it.

What HDR lends to an image like this one is more detail in the rocks in the foreground and buildings.