How Do You Bracket?

[dalematt]

Sorry for asking this as I am sure that it is easy and obvious; however, being old and doty, I have to ask.

I have begun doing HDR photos. A couple of weeks ago, I managed to stumble upon bracketing (-5 through +5), went on a holiday, came back, and completely forgot how I did it (I'm being tested for early dementia which may help explain my predicament). Of course, it never occurred to me to write down such an "easy" (at the time) procedure.

I would very much appreciate any advice or help. I have Paintshop Photo Pro X3 and a Nikon D 3100 camera.

Thanks.

Dale

[df]

I wrote a tutorial a while back and posted it on Flickr. You can see it at http://www.flickr.com/groups/tutorial_c ... 036303135/

According to another poster Nikon calls it Exposure Bracketing in the menus, but the rest is pretty much all there. And it's written for PSP X3 too. And good luck on your dementia.

[dalematt]

Thanks, Dan, for your reply. I have tried many of these in the past and have been successful to varying degrees. But, unless I missed something in your tutorial, everything applies to taking 2 or more photos.

Two to 4 weeks ago, I stumbled on bracketing a photo that has been altered to produce 2 or more photos of the same photo (e.g. light, normal, dark) but I had numbers from which to choose, I believe, from -5.0 to +5.0. I'm also thinking that it had to do with exposure or meter. But, now I forget how I did that. The advantage was that I could merge 2 or more photos of the one photo into an HDR (e.g. a photo of my always moving dog reproduced into 2 or more of my now not moving dog). Does this make sense? I know what I'm trying to say, but am worried that I'm not making sense.

Anyway, if Dan or anyone else, can help, I would greatly appreciate it!

Dale

[df]

If you're asking how you get your camera to bracket the images then you'll want to be in Aperture priority mode and not any of the automatic modes. Look in the menus for Exposure Bracketting.

If you're asking how you do this with a single image after it's been shot. You'll need to shoot in RAW, Jpeg will have already thrown away too much information. Then with your RAW file editor of choice you'll decrease the exposure (brightness) as far as that editor will allow and process into a Tiff (or Jpeg if you get good enough results but I don't care for Jpegs for editing), so lets assume that your editor lets you decrease the brightness by 5 stops, -5. Then you'll increase brightness to 0 (or you can step it gradually if you'd like) and process to a Tiff again, changing the file name of course so that you don't overwrite the file you just created. Then recreate that with the overexposed (over brightened) files.
When that is done, you can plug those into whatever HDR editor you'd like.

Good luck

[dalematt]

Dan,

This worked.

It isn't the same as I somehow did a couple of weeks ago. Your suggestion has more to it re steps, but It's not difficult/complicated.

Thank you very much for helping me! I very much appreciate it!

Dale