HDR photography with Photomatix and Lightroom 3 Beta

Posted by Khürt in How To

I’ve been poking around with HDR and Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta. Up until recently my work-flow consisted of importing my photos from an SD card directly into iPhoto in Nikon RAW format. I make some minor changes — contrast, colour, crop — and upload the better ones to flickr and facebook. Once I started using Lightroom I had so much more available to me. I could adjust everything. But that’s not what this post is about.

I’ve fallen in love with the plug-in mechanism. I found one for flickr, for facebook, CVS, email and a host of other things. One of the coolest plug-ins I found was for Photomatix, a piece of software I’ve used in the past to do some High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. High-dynamic-range photographs are generally achieved by capturing multiple standard photographs using exposure bracketing, and then merging them into an HDR image. With the Photomatix plug-in for Lightroom this is quite easy to do. Select a set of photos (I usually use 5) in Lightroom and select the export to Photomatix plug-in. Lightroom launches Photomatix where I do a little bit of tone mapping and the results are imported back into Lightroom. Easy peasy.