To move for a second to the actual software, X4 has response curves for individual brands of digital camera (just camera brand, and not model...), so you select the brand you have. As far as EV difference for the three exposures, the maximum I have on my Panasonic DMC-ZS1 is 1.0 EV, and in general you want to use the maximum difference that your camera can give you. So you set your camera for a three shot burst at max, min and center EV values and point and shoot.
Now, it is fairly important that the camera does not MOVE during this three shot burst! The choices are shoot from a tripod, which can be a PITA if you get a surprise sunset and don’t have the tripod or time to set up at a good location, and shoot while leaning against something and having the image stabilization feature activated on the camera. If you shoot with a tripod, the three frames will be perfectly aligned, and when you input them into the HDR software, you will select the alignment option of “Align by Frame”. If you shoot handheld, you will select the alignment option of “Align by Content”, and then the software will chew on all three pictures to get the pixels to match up. Depending on how much you involuntarily moved while shooting handheld, your resulting shot will either be workable or junk. No middle ground! After HDR processing, if the renditions show distant treetops or closer branches or leaves in different locations, just scrap all three images and move on.
To deal with the VERY subjective issue of what you want out of your HDR photo, that’s going to depend on your own personal taste, and a large part of the challenge with HDR photos is deciding which settings are best as far as YOU are concerned. The answer to the question is going to be VERY different for Andy Warhol and Ansel Adams, and it’s going to depend on what YOU think is the strongest image that has the most “punch”, “message”, “impact”, or “meaning” to the viewer. I am going to deliberately ignore the whole subject of different pools of viewers, and that’s something for you to decide.
With HDR exposures, suffice it to say that you can go from a slight tweak of the original shots to improve the color and realism all the way to a totally abstract image with colors way beyond anything nature has, and it depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
For me, personally, my limit is to try and go for maximum color and intensity variation withOUT making the shot hideously garish, surreal, and avoiding degradation of detail with too much overexposure to highlight areas. The one guideline that works best for me is to avoid the “blue tree and foliage” syndrome. For me that’s an over-the edge detail that pretty much devalues the picture as a whole, and changes it from attention grabbing and interesting to a “WTF is this??” reaction from the viewer. I have also found that you have to stay closer to reality with landscapes, sunsets, and other physical objects, and you can venture further away from reality with HDR pictures of things like clouds and reflections.
One of the very interesting capabilities of HDR is the ability to tease hidden detail out of three images, and you can take three images of a totally “BLAH” scene that would otherwise not merit even getting your camera out, and wind up with something worth looking at. In contrast, I have found that if you are lucky enough to get a very rare “perfect sunset” picture with all the colors and tones near perfection with a single shot, HDR techniques may not get you anything better, but in the vast majority of imperfect pictures you can get somewhere with HDR processing.
Now, to go back to the nuts and bolts of the X4 code, after you process your three images into an HDR image, the screen changes and you wind up in the HDR edit mode.
The image below shows the 1st screen in HDR edit mode, and it’s worthwhile noting that this is actually a separate program from X4, and you’ll see a separate icon pop up on the bottom task bar when you use it. At bottom left of the actual picture are thumbnails of the three pictures, and the image on the main screen is the highlighted thumbnail. Since I shoot handheld, the alignment selection at the center of the left edge of the screen is set to Feature-Based. Once you have gotten your three photos aligned, you hit the Process button on the lower left of the screen.
As far as quality, as you can see this picture is nothing special, and if you photograph sunsets I’m sure you have single exposure shots with ten times the message and “frameability” that this one has. Im my opinion, it’s barely worth keeping.
The image below shows the 2nd screen in the HDR edit mode, and you can see the individual sliders on the left and Default presets 1 - 4 in the upper left corner. The image on the screen has changed to an average of the three photos, but none of the Default settings have been applied to the image yet. This image is better than the one in the 1st screen, but still nothing to write home about.
The image below shows the picture with preset Default 2 applied, and compared to the previous image, in my opinion it’s a slight improvement.
The image below shows the picture with preset Default 4 applied, and some things have gotten better and some things worse than Default 2. The “punch” of the colors in the sky half of the shot have been increased, but the trees and the water are now darker and underexposed, so half is an improvement (IMHO!) and half is worse.
The image below shows the picture with preset Default 1 applied, and here you are going over the edge as far as I am concerned. The horizon line is burnt out, the fine detailing in the colors around the sun is getting lost, and some of the infamous “Bilious Blue” trees are starting to show up on the far shoreline. It can get a lot worse than this, believe me!! Over all, this is not an improvement in any aspect.
And finally, the image below shows the picture with preset Default 3 applied, and as you can see, the whole scene is starting to suffer from burnout and over-emphasized colors. With some photos, Defaults 1 and 3 can take you all the way past Peter Max to Andy Warhol, and in general Default 2 and 4 are more useful than Default 1 and 3. Remember this fact, as it plays a very key role in how the system of 16 presets are “numbered”!!.
Now, the real problem here, which this whole post is trying to address, is how do you go from Default 2 or 4 to a best possible picture?
You can try to manipulate the sliders to optimize an individual photo, and then save those settings as a preset, but you find yourself struggling with bilious blue trees to get to that point, and then when you go on to the next photo shoot, you discover that your painfully handcrafted presets from the previous session don’t make any major changes worth noting. The final conclusion, which I came to after scores or perhaps more than 100 hours of fiddling, is that you need an organized system of presets that is larger than the 4 that came with the software. To really get an improvement in the processed HDR image, you need to get the contrast, highlight, midtone, background and vibrancy settings all changed TOGETHER to get you into the final processing ballpark.
The rather rudimentary mathematical exposition that follows is my solution to this problem, and in practice it works very well for most photos, and in general you need very little more processing to wind up with a finished product.
The image below is the one I selected from my collection of 16 presets as the best, and this is on the 3rd HDR edit screen, which you get to by pressing the Process button on the lower left of the 2nd screen shown previously. Note the menu options on the left side, and in general, I have found that sunsets benefit from a High Pass Sharpening process using the Soft Light option. The 2nd picture below shows the subtle but positive effect of this processing.
One other note: Defaults 5 and 6 are essentially B&W HDR renditions of the image, and in my work, have no use whatsoever, so I delete them from the 2nd HDR Edit screen.
Now, to expand the four presets (Defaults) into a system of 16 presets, we start with the existing software, and here are the values for the 4 presets that come with the software. It should be noted that you do NOT have to perform any of these simple but tedious calculations yourself, and I am just demonstrating the method in case you wish to adapt it to your own needs. Possibly you may want to try a different number of presets, or perhaps a non-linear interpolation of the data. So just watch the screens go by and relax, because all the work has already been done for you.
The first step is to go from a 2x2 data table to a 4x4 data table, so you just create a larger 4x4 grid and put the 4 presets (Defaults) in the corners. This is shown below:
Now that you have done this, all the blank squares need to be filled in with numbers that are obtained by calculating a linear numerical progression from one corner to the other. To demonstrate, the Contrast and Highlight values are calculated for the squares between preset (Default) 1 and 2.
The Contrast value for Default 1 is 80, and the Contrast value for Default 2 is 12. That makes a difference of 68, and if you divide this difference by 3, you get a value of 23. So for the 2nd square in the top row, you subtract 23 from 80 and get a value of 57. For the third square you subtract 23 from 57 and get 34. Similarily, the difference between 13 and -12 is 25 (and NOT 1!!), so dividing 25 by 3 produces a value of 8. So for the 2nd square you subtract 8 from 13 to get a value of 5, and in the 3rd square you subtract 8 from 5 to get -3. The results are shown below:
This process is continued to fill in the top and bottom horizontal rows:
And then repeated to fill in the left and right vertical rows:
Finally, you go from left to right to fill in the four remaining inner squares:
Now, the question becomes how do your label your new set of 16 custom presets? The simplest and most obvious solution is to label them Preset 1 to Preset 16 by going from left to right on the table and then top to bottom by rows, so that Preset 1 is in the top left and Preset 16 is on the bottom right. Unfortunately, if you do it this way you will wind up with a hideous, confusing mess on the 2nd HDR edit screen, and you will completely lose track of the order of the presets. While this makes sense on the spreadsheet, computers have their own numerical hierarchy, so the 1 - 16 numbering system will come out as : 1, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 2, 3, 4, etc. The 2nd problem is that the presets are confined to a column that is just two presets wide in the software, so you can’t simply fit a 4x4 preset system into the existing software.
Note to Corel programmers working on X6: Maybe you should do something about this!?!
Remember that I had previously said that working between Defaults 2 and 4 produced better results than working between Defaults 1 and 3? From all the shoots I have done so far, this is almost universally true, so the actual workflow in selecting presets looks like this:
You go down from Default 2 to 4, and at the same time try going one square to the left to see if there is improvement with these presets. If you’re still not satisfied, you can try going from Default 4 to Default 3, and going up one square along the way to see if you find what you want. In the unlikely circumstance that you have an HDR image that is VERY unusual, you can try going from Default 3 to Default 1. In conclusion, the search path for looking for the best preset is Default 2 -> Default 4 -> Default 3 -> Default 1. The preset labeling method that works and wont’s get scrambled up by the computer is to label the presets by letter of the alphabet going from top to bottom with the two right columns, and then going from bottom to top with the two left columns to match the actual search path. The results are shown in the workflow above, and note that Defaults 1 - 4 have been appended to the letter code so you can keep track of where you are in the matrix.
Shown below is the 4x4 preset matrix without the arrows, and this is the picture that you want to print out on a full page and keep next to your computer while you’re working.
And finally, in case you come up with a new scheme to rename your presets that means more to you, you will want to know where these files are located, so you can change the file names. The preset files are nowhere near the PSP X4 software, and as it turns out, they are in YOUR OWN USER FILES! This is very good programming, because it means the software can be used by more than one person, and their own presets will come up with the program rather than your presets. Your preset files are located at:
C:\Users\Me\Documents\Corel PaintShopPro\14.0\HDR\UserSaved
Now, as far as examples of what you can do with the X4 HDR module, here are some examples of before and after shots. The before shots are all the center EV value for the three shot burst.
First, we have a very so-so piece of a Minnesota sunrise with some bad weather coming in from the SW (right of photo), and you wouldn’t normally point your camera at something like this with the expectations of getting anything worth keeping.
The results were unexpected and quite dramatic, and also illustrate a general guideline as far as realism versus abstraction. You’ll have a lot more success making the transition from realism to something else if you’re taking pictures of clouds, water, or other non-solid objects. That also brings up an editing possibility if you’re doing HDR work and don’t like part of the HDR image: Crop out the half you don’t like, and just use the presets to maximize the quality of the part you do like!
Next, we have a totally worthless shot of some storm clouds coming in from the West (right), and you’d pretty much have to be in the mood to deliberately waste your time for no reason to take this shot. I should note that the only reason I did was that my eyes were picking up some very fine detail which doesn’t show on the shot itself.
The result was a big surprise, although I admit I had to thrown in every color tweak available in X4 to get to this point. Obviously, HDR works very well for dark storm clouds which would otherwise come out underexposed even if you pushed your camera with a single shot.
The next photograph is a total HDR failure, which may illustrate that if you’re really on top of a good sunset, sometimes one shot is better than three. The single shot:
And the pretty much regrettable 1968 San Francisco psychedelic rock concert poster rendition of the original.:
Hopefully, for those of you interested in exploring the HDR capabilities of PSP X4, this guide should give you some help in setting up a useful system of presets, so that you can process a shoot in an evening knowing what you are doing, rather than fiddling with the sliders for a week and never knowing which way to go with a shot.