HDR photography with Photomatix and Lightroom 3 Beta

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.

Big Red Barn
Big Red Barn by Khürt, on Flickr
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.
Blue skies
Blue skies by Khürt, on Flickr

Sunday Morning Links

On Sunday night, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will appear on “60 Minutes” to tell the world that Facebook is in trouble. - GigaOm

What can/should you do with an OpenID end-point? - Scott Kveton

Yet another reason for open records, and replying to Joy - Paradise Preoccupied

A confident Mac megasite confirms MacBook Nano - Appletell

Workstreaming: One Secret of Web Work Success - Web Worker Daily