Expose Right.

[david357]

Another good academy evening at Anglesey Arms last night, and several people will now be listing items on ebay, I guess, following the session on product photography with Chris and Eifion.

The reason for this post though is to offer some follow up advice to the excellent session by Paul Kay on Raw conversion and the importance of changing some of the settings BEFORE importing the files into photoshop. Here is a link to the really useful Luminous Landscape site, that in this article gives more information on the topic of "exposing right", or making sure that the main part of the data of the image is on the right hand side of the histogram.
Link http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml

Paul's session probably didn't appeal to everyone (no sessions do!), but some of us found it to be very informative and interesting. There is lots more of this type of information on the Luminous Landscape site.

The other software and technique discussed last night (at least in our group), was Photomatix pro, used for producing HDR (High Dynamic Range) images, and a free trial download is available here:
http://www.hdrsoft.com/index.html

Read the information first, and I would suggest finding and taking the bracketed exposures BEFORE you install the software, then you will get the full trial period to work on your images.

Hope this is of some help to someone,
David.

[Marian J]

I use Photomatix, and really like it a lot, sometimes using the exposure blending, but mostly for HDR. I need to work on the tone mapping side a lot more, and there are some excellent tutorials on photomatix and HDR from Stuck in Customs - http://www.stuckincustoms.com/hdr-tutorial/ which also has a useful 15% off coupon for when you download it (wish I had found the tutorial first!)

Another useful HDR sofware download is DynamicPhotoHDR. That was the first one I used. I still use that at times as it has more controls over aligning the image than I have found with Photomatix, as well as a cool little function that allows you to 'paint' over all occurences of a moving object to do away with 'ghosting'. If I use this one I will still do the tone mapping in Photomatix as I have the full version, With a trial version you can't save a HDR, but they have a pretty nice tone mapping part too.

I find that DynamicHDR is quicker for doing a HDR from a single RAW too (think that is a full version bit of it) than Photomatix is.

I have a friend that still uses the Photomatix trial version, and almost the best part of it all for him is cloning out the mark that will be visible on the tone mapped image.

I am a fan of HDR :)

Marian