 Imagine shooting a vacation photo similar to this HDR photograph of me in Nevada. Take my word for it, when people see a photo like this they get jealous and that’s what a vacation photo is suppose to do! I was able to shoot this photo using a HDR technique I developed. Yeah… it involves a little more work than your standard point and shoot vacation photo. But you know what… if it makes my friends envious, it’s worth it. |
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The Standard HDR Look of People
 Photographing HDR of people is a little trickier than shooting landscapes. Most HDR photos of people turn out similar to this photo on the right. Notice how blurry the background is because of the depth of field. Blurry and HDR don’t mix well. I’ve experimented with several HDR approach for photographing people, and the traditional approach doesn’t work. People don’t process well in Photomatix. They end up muddy and dirty. That grungy look is cool but not for everything, especially people. |
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Captain Kimo’s HDR Technique for Portraits
It’s simple really… instead of shooting 3 exposures, I shoot 4.
Below are the first three exposures taken for the background.
 The photo on the left is the 4th exposure. This photo is focused on me and will be superimposed onto the landscape above. Below are instructions to put it all together. |
Software and Plugin Required
- Photomatix – software for creating HDR
- Portraiture – plugin for touching up portraits
- Topaz ReMask – plugin used for masking layers
- Photoshop – photo editing program
Step 1 – Merge Landscape Exposures
The first thing we do is merge the three landscape exposures together to create our HDR photo. We do this by using Photomatix. The benefit of separating the subject from the background is that you can go crazy tone mapping without effecting the subject. Below is the final result of our tone mapping from Photomatix.
Step 2 – Processing the Subject
If your subject needs cleaning up, now would be a good time to remove pimples or unwanted blemishes. I use Portraiture to do this because it does a fantastic job while saving me lots of time. Below is a screen capture of my Portraiture window. Left image is the original, right image is the filtered result.
Step 3 – Masking the Subject
Next I begin masking out the background using Topaz ReMask, another time saving plugin! Below is the masking process using ReMask. Please note quality of screen capture program is a little grainy.
Step 4 – Superimposing Subject with HDR Photo
Pretty straight forward process. Take the photo of your subject and place it on top of your HDR landscape. Below is the result from Step 4.
The above image isn’t the final product. There are a few more steps, like applying Topaz Adjust and re-cropping the image, ect… but I won’t get into that. You can read more about that in Chapter 5 of my HDR How-to Guide.
Well that’s it for this tutorial. I hope I was able to shed some light into shooting better HDR portraits. I might eventually do a video on this tutorial so sign-up with FeedBurner and get updated when I do.
P.S. Please website with your friends and family.
Imagine shooting a vacation photo similar to this HDR photograph of me in Nevada. Take my word for it, when people see a photo like this they get jealous and that’s what a vacation photo is suppose to do! I was able to shoot this photo using a HDR technique I developed. Yeah… it involves a little more work than your standard point and shoot vacation photo. But you know what… if it makes my friends envious, it’s worth it.
Photographing HDR of people is a little trickier than shooting landscapes. Most HDR photos of people turn out similar to this photo on the right. Notice how blurry the background is because of the depth of field. Blurry and HDR don’t mix well. I’ve experimented with several HDR approach for photographing people, and the traditional approach doesn’t work. People don’t process well in Photomatix. They end up muddy and dirty. That grungy look is cool but not for everything, especially people.
The photo on the left is the 4th exposure. This photo is focused on me and will be superimposed onto the landscape above. Below are instructions to put it all together.
hah..now I know the trick..damn..:)
LoL… not much of a trick, I wish I had something more worth while for you.
Wow you pictures are good. I am new and just trying to learn thank you very much.
Thanks Judy. Good luck HDR!
Very clever! Thank you for your great ideas!
No problem Matt, there’s more than one way to skin a cat
thank u 2 good
Very insightful.. thank you for the knowledge you’ve shared. i’ve become an HDR photography fan because of people like you. thank you.
That is an interesting way of adding people into a HDR photo. I’ve had a number of problems with HDR’ing people and they include:
1) People don’t tend to stay still long enough or still enough for 3 exposures.
2) Once you obtained getting them still enough, tonemapping generally creates really odd skin tones and a very unnatural appearance.
HDR is great for inanimate objects (like you implied) but for human beings it makes them look as if they have theatrical make-up on. I’ve actually tried your technique and the one thing I found was that I had to tweak the skin tone of the human beings a bit so that they don’t appear oddly desaturated compared with the rest of the photo.
However, in your photo example above, you seem to have done a very good job getting the right amount of color saturation for the human being’s skin tone with the rest of the picture. Did you do any tweaking to the fourth photo (the photo with you in it)? Perhaps taken the 4th in RAW and did a HDR for that photo only, to get a slight HDR effect?
Thomas, I applied Topaz Adjust slightly to give it that dynamic effect so that it would match the HDR image. I find that without it, the photo looks kinda off… like there’s something wrong but you can’t figure it out. But with a little Topaz Adjust it solves that problem.
Regards, Kimo
Mr. Kimo,
I’m jus
Thanks for sharing your tips – please keep them coming!
Awesome work!
When I get this ebook done I plan on doing lots of cool stuff, make sure your on the feedburner list, best way to keep updated which new stuff happening from the site.
Hi,
This might be a stupid question. But can’t you just simulate three exposures by taking one picture and just exposure adjust in photoshop?
//Richard
[...] Rain Delay by JackAZ on Feb 27, 2010 • 6:07 pm No Comments Action in the pits during one of the many rain delays at the 2010 NHRA Arizona Nationals atFirebird International Raceway. Three shot HDR with a new processing step to handle humans in the mix thanks to Captain Kimo. [...]
hi there captain, i have just completed putting up my homephoto studio and i want to make a dif here in my country. i want to specialize in glamour and fashion- with hdr as a twist. please advise me on anything u think would make me achieve great photoshoots for my models. ASANTE (thanks in kiswahili)
If you plan on doing HDR I would not recommend using the studio or a studio, instead use natural environments, like the park or beach, anywhere were you need to achieve high dynamic range is the best place.
Richard, yes you can but you won’t get the same dynamic range.
Kimo are you familiar with Howard Huang the photographer? He has a popular book called “Urban Girls”. He seems to use this HDR technique as his signature style. His pictures look very nice with high dynamic ranges and he also seems to do a good job seperating the models from his backgrounds as far as the amount of HDR effect. Do you think that he is using this same technique? Because since he is doing portraiture of models it would seem difficult to get them to stay still for 3 exposures. Any light you can shed on this?
HDR can be confused with the illustrative/graphic look when a photo is processed to a certain degree. Most likely it’s a lot of Photoshop work that’s been composited together. I would have to see the photo to get a better idea what went on.
hey kimo,i am currently in thailand. am staying@ a hotel called amari watergate. am free tomorrow and was hoping to get some photos here.any advice where to visit? love ur work!
ikeda, I don’t know too many places in Bangkok. I only stop there at my aunts house. But then I usually get out of town. Bangkok is such an amazing place you don’t really have to go anywhere to shoot something cool.
Just read that tutorial. Amazing!!! Great work!!!
Thanks John.