I thought it might be of interest to show how I process my HDR shots and how it transforms the original photos.
Here is the process I used for one of my last photos, "Bamboo Forest" :
– First, I take 3 shots from the same position using the bracketing feature of my camera. Here I bracketed at +-3EV because the sky was very bright and I wanted to capture it in the best conditions. Turns out it was not enough because even in the -3EV shot, the sky is still a bit burned.
– Then, I use Photomatix to merge the three shots in one HDR picture and tone-map the HDR into an LDR picture. The tone-mapped picture allows to see at the same time the bright and dark areas of the original shots. A lot of settings are involved in the tone-mapping process and the result can vary from natural to very artificial looking. I try to always keep my processing natural.
– Finally, I edit the tone-mapped picture in Lightroom. Here, the picture lacked global contrast and was not well framed (when looking near the edges, the eye could be drawn out of the picture). So I finely tuned the exposition and contrast curve, added a bit of sharpness and the last touch was a soft vignetting, darkening the edges but not too much.
I am quite happy with the result !
Picture license : CC BY-NC-SA