First try at HDR in Elements 6

wildman · 12 Feb 2012 at 01:37

SO went out for a walk about today. Only had kit lens on the body as left the bag at home.

Tried to follow the tutorial on HDR in elements 6 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Dpdrh4NEU

Ran into lots of problems though as it wasn't a landscape shot so couldn't use gradient feature. Got there in the end though

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wildman · 12 Feb 2012 at 02:26

Wedge said:
Hey Jav (TDB forever)

Not great if im honest, tis all a bit Yellow n Black, not much R in the HDR.

Try here http://www.stuckincustoms.com/hdr-video-tutorial/

yeah the contrast is pretty ghastly. I t was all from 1 RAW file so I was really scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get it balanced. Also the sun was pretty low to the left there so there was quite a high ammount of orange / yellow that got recovered when I was trying to pull the sky back

wildman · 12 Feb 2012 at 03:00

pecnarf said:
hmm did you use one shot (mean one raw file) or did use 1 shot (3 raws file at different exposures using AEB function). true hdr is done either using AEB bracketing at different exposure or manually taking 3 shot at different exposures with the uses of ND filter so that you can take longer exposure. then using these three different files to blend them together either manually or the use of a HDR plug-in/function.

1 raw file only, you can't combine raw files in elements 6, you need to use layers / masks from the same raw I thought using the place command

wildman · 12 Feb 2012 at 15:41

thanks all for the comments and pointers. I know that the best way to achieve HDR is using 3 separate RAW files. However I only had a copy of PE6 knocking around. So as I am still in the experimental stage I thought i'd try to learn everything I can using PE6 before I decide to lay down more cash on more powerful editing software.

Next on my list to but in a few months will be Lightroom and will probably get the latest version of elements. I will likely look at purchasing a dedicated HDR piece of software too.

I know the photo isn't great and my techniques in both taking photo's and processing needs a hell of a lot more work so I welcome the comments made so far as they will help me get better I hope