How to Tone-Map & Edit an HDR Image

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to give you an overview and introduction to HDR, or High Dynamic Range Photography. So let's go ahead and go over here to tone mapping. Then you'll see the window pop up. It looks completely different in this window, and so the first thing that I want to do is I want to change the output, because 16-bit depth is something my computer can't render. So, I can view it, and I can edit it, but opening it up in the editor, the photos are massive; they’re hundreds of megabytes. So, you're going to see a couple of options over here. Your first one is your strength, and this is going to adjust the strength of your tone mapping. You can see that it affects how strongly the photos are overlaid on top of each other basically. All that you'll see your color saturation. You can go all the way back; you can make it black and white. You can crank it all the way up; make it look really weird, kind of surreal. Usually, I like to keep it somewhere nearer the middle, but on this one I might go a little high. This one's for your light smoothing, and you can see what that does is that really adjusts your shadows a great deal. I'm going to do it this way just to keep the sky looking kind of mellow like that. You can also adjust your micro-contrast, which you can't really notice until you're really zoomed in really, really close. This is your micro smoothing. This smoothens out all your edges. You can see this is unsmoothed; it's really rough, and kind of stranger looking. But if you crank it all the way up, you'll see it applies a nice kind of a blur to everything. So we'll this is also good to bring out cloud detail, as you can see; trying to find the point at which it makes the clouds pop, without making it look weird. I think that's about as far as I'm going to get. You can also adjust the white clip/black clip in your images. So like here, if we crank up the white clipping it really brightens everything up. Turn up your black clipping and it starts bringing all your detail back into the photo. So, I think maybe it was something around there."