HDR Tutorial Part 4 – How to Improve your HDR
As you can see, there are some differences between the image of Photomatix and the finished one. This final part of HDR Tutorial makes the bigger differences in your image, but here, the personal taste is very important.
You can use typical correction tools of Photoshop, such as curves, levels, contrast etc … or use several plugins that can simplify the editing of the HDR.
My favourite plugins to improve your HDR are Topaz Adjust, Color Efex Pro and Topaz Denoise
TOPAZ ADJUST
This is great plugin that can enhance your HDR effect. To launch Topaz Adjust first duplicate your layer and then go to Filters> Topaz Labs> Topaz Adjust. Once the plugin is launched, on the left you will see many presets that can help you to increase the HDR effect or just improve colors and contrast on your image. I select Filter Photo Pop.
COLOR EFEX PRO
The second plugin to improve your HDR. This software help you about many types of corrections of HDR ; I usually edit this with the typical tools of Photoshop for these things, but this filter can easily help you for this kind of correction. To launch Color Efex Pro go to Filters>Nik Software>Color Efex Pro. On the left you will see a list of presets about, color, saturation, details, glow effect or brightness or darkness The most interesting filters for me are:
Skylight Filter: to intensify the effect of sunset
Glamour Glow: Denoise the image, with a glow effect typical of portraits but that produces pleasurable effects but also in landscape photography
Detail Extractor: To increase the level of detail in the picture
Pro Contrast: A present that include color, contrast and dynamic contrast correction, is very nice to correct the white balance in your picture and to increase the surreal effect on the contrast.
TOPAZ DENOISE
The noise is one of the biggest problems of HDR. It can happen sometimes that we do not feel satisfied with the work achieved over just because the image is too noisy. Don’t worry about that, the noise is easy to eliminate, as there are several Photoshop plug-ins to do this. Personally I use Topaz Denoise.
Topaz Denoise Photoshop plug-in offers the fastest and most effective way to reduce heavy reduction noise putting unrivaled quality at your fingertips.
To remove noise with this plug-ins open your HDR image in Photoshop, create a new level and launch Topaz Denoise.
Apply the filter it may deem best for your image, I usually use jpeg moderate or jpeg strong. When you’re done click OK.
MASK YOUR RESULTS
To get a good result you not only will need to use these filters, to better improve your HDR it will be necessary to reduce their effect selectively, through the use of Layer Masks. Sometimes a filter has a nice effect on your image but that some parts of the picture are particularly affected by that. The use of layer masks and the bale of their effects with opacity is crucial to give the best in this type of photography. To return to the other types of correction, be inspired by your imagination and personal taste, many good results are obtained with the right experiments.
