How To Make Your Photos Look Better - Maybe

          Ok, so if you don't know already, I live in China.  I promised a friend back home in the good old USA that I would show her how to do some of the things I do to my photos.  Obviously I can't do that now, so here's my written explanation.  Now, I know that some of my photographer friends who are really good at what they do will /facepalm themselves upon reading this, but that's ok.  I like this method and it's suited me well so far.

          Ok, so the first step, obviously, is to take a picture.  Or pick out one that you already have...whatever. So this picture of the Great Wall isn't a bad picture, but it's not what it could be.  So what I do is add my photo to Adobe Lightroom and do some minor tweaking to it.







In Lightroom I will almost always adjust the Clarity and Vibrance, mainly because...well I just like how it looks.

Then, I will adjust the Luminance, which is just noise reduction.  I didn't really need to do that with this photo but I suppose it can't hurt anything, right?



Ok so in lightroom go to File -> export and then choose where you want to export it to.  Usually I just export to the desktop when dealing with a single photo like this and deal with putting it somewhere else later.

Now, usually I'm done at this point, I might tweak a few more things in Lightroom but this is usually all I use now to edit my photos.  Mainly because it's easy, I'm lazy, and there's a 'reset' button.  But, I also like to occasionally make HDR photos, so that what the rest of this is all about.

This is the picture after my Lightroom editing.  I think it looks better than my original and as I said earlier, I would normally stop here +/- some additional tweaks to the exposure, contrast, and various other settings I like to mess with.

Ok! So, with this image, I'm going to open it up in Photoshop just to make copies of it at different exposures.  Because, when it comes down to it, that's basically what HDR is...a bunch of different exposures of the same image smashed together.

To do this, go to Image -> Adjustments -> Exposure and change the number.  For this particular project I did -3, -1, 1, and 3.  Once you do some yourself you will be have your own taste as to how many exposures you want to use and all that jazz.  Now, if you have a camera that has auto-bracketing then this step is unnecessary because with just one click of your shutter button it will do this automatically within your camera.  Unfortunately mine does not have that feature...
Ok, so repeat this process of changing the exposure in Photoshop and Save As, rinse and repeat.  I generally like to re-name my images at this point so that I know what the exposure is.  For example I would re-name it something like GreatWall -3 and the next one GreatWall -1, so that I can keep track of the exposures for the next part.

        Next, open up Photomatrix.  Click on Generate HDR Image.  It will bring up a prompt for you to select your photos you want to mash together.

          Ok so after your photos are loaded up, make sure that the numbers on the right hand side (what it thinks your exposure is) match up with the actual exposure of your images.  You can simply highlight the numbers on the right and change them manually if they don't match up.  Hit OK and it will start to generate your image.

After it's done 'thinking' it will show you an image of all the pictures smashed together.  We're not done yet.  Click on 'Tone Mapping' and it will bring up your image and several adjustments you can make on the left hand side.

          Now, this part...you're on your own.  Just play around with the settings.  You can see some of the settings I used for this particular image, but each one will usually have its own unique configuration.

Original

So, there you have it.  I tend to only make HDR Images when i'm fairly certain they will turn out good.  This was just a quick example for this post.  It turned out pretty good, in my opinion, but some people simply don't, and never will, like the way HDR Images look.

HDR

Again, there is probably a much much better way to do this and to make it turn out better.  This is just how I usually do it, and as I said before, I like how my photos turn out (usually).