Post Processing a Single RAW

34 Street Vanishing Point
Canon 60D, Tokina Pro DX-II 11-16mm f/2.8, f/4, 1/50s, 100ISO, 11mm

High Dynamic Range, or HDR Photography is a style that polarizes the photography community. There are plenty of resources out there that will explain what HDR is, and how to accomplish it, but I will attempt to give a summary. 

Your camera has a dynamic range, in simple terms, it is how much data it can collect from blacks to whites. Some cameras have better dynamic range than others, but as of now, no camera is going to have the same dynamic range as your eyes perceive. If you take a picture of a high contrast scene, the camera will not be able to gather all the details in the dark areas and the bright areas, even though you are able to see the shadows and the lighter areas fine. One way that some photographers combat this problem is to utilize HDR. One method of HDR photography is to bracket your shots, that is to take one shot for "proper" exposure, then another shot a stop or more underexposed, and another shot overexposured. Using software, such as Adobe Photoshop, or what I use, Photomatrix, you will then combine these images into one image to give you a final HDR image.

The problem with some HDR photography, much like any post processing techniques, is that the result can look "overbaked". I suffered from this when I first started. You push the sliders too much, and you are left with an image that looks completely unnatural. I try to keep my processing towards the natural side these days and aiming to tweak to compensate for my cameras short comings. I want to convey what my eye saw when I captured an image. Not to say I don't take a little artistic license with some landscape shots, but I also am not trying to create a gaudy over saturated image either.

I'm going to share how I created the above image from a single RAW.

I started with capturing an image, trying to nail the exposure in camera to limit post processing needed. Unfortunately, the dynamic range of the scene was too broad, with the dark shadows and bright sunlight. I had taken the image handheld, and hadn't thought to bracket the shot. So I had one RAW image to work with, which should allow me with enough leeway to go about 3 stops over or under exposure in post.

After importing my image into Adobe Lightroom, I tried to see if I could edit it to a version I was happy with, but was still a little too blown out, or too dark. So I decided to make a two virtual copies in Lightroom.

Original Image with Lightroom Edits

The original base image was reduced by half a stop in exposure, tweaked the highlights, shadows, blacks and white, with clarity bumped up as well. Lens correction, which applies distortion correction and remove color fringing, was applied, as well as some sharpening. As you can see, the sky is a little too bright, and we are loosing some of the details in the shadows.

The "first" virtual copy received the same edit since it was a copy of the original image. Then the exposure was increased to 1.5 stops (2 stops over the above image). The darker areas of the image are now more visible. That gave me this result:

Overexposed Virtual Copy #1

The "second" copy had the same edits, but then exposure was decreased to -2.5 (2 stops less than the original edit). The sky has turned from white to the blue that I saw when taking the image. The result gave me this:

Underexposed Virtual Copy #2

 At this point, I now had three images. I then used the Photomatrix plugin for Lightroom to merge the three images to a 32bit HDR file. The file created was a TIFF. The new file received a little more editing in Lightroom, and the result was the image in the beginning of the post. 

I hope you enjoyed a peak at my workflow!