I’ll start with Photoshop, your one-stop shop for all things photographic. Once you’ve imported your photos and unified them as far as color temperature, white balance, and the like, it’s time to let PS do some work for you. Close the files out and go to the File menu, then Automate, and select “Merge to HDR.” Import the files you just finished adjusting and hit OK. There is an option here to attempt to automatically align your source images, but it very rarely results in a clearer image than you would have had otherwise; it remains the best practice to simply have an immobile camera and as similar a shot as you can get across the exposures.
Once you’ve clicked OK, Photoshop will open all your photos, get the information it wants from them, merge, fiddle, freak out a little bit, laze around, and eventually pop up an image. Hooray! It probably looks like junk. Fear not, for this is what we expected. If your image looks fuzzy or one shot is clearly out of place, you can click the check boxes on the left hand side one at a time to remove or include individual images to try and clean it up.
Once you’ve got the images you want in the combination, make sure the depth is still set to 32 bits, and hit OK. The Shop will laze about a little more and eventually make your 32-bit image. We don’t, however, have a 32-bit display, remember? So to make it worthwhile to ourselves and our viewing public, it’s time to downsample! Go ahead and select Image -> Mode -> 16 bits/channel and look at the dialog that emerges. If we want to turn 32 bits into 16, we have to tell it how, exactly – so let’s select Local Adaptation from the drop down box, click on the Toning Curve and Histogram arrow at the bottom, and play with our curves.
Now curves are a tough thing to master, and certainly nothing we’ll go into here – it will behoove you greatly to research and practice with curves in the rest of your photographic life, and it’s too important and lengthy to include today. This, however, is essentially your tone mapping in PS; you’re converting your 32-bit image to 16 and, through curves, telling Photoshop how you’d like the colors to relate to each other. After you’re done adjusting them, click OK, and you’ll get a processed 16-bit shot. From here, you’re free to post-process as you normally do – adjust your colors, highlights, contrast, curves, whatever you normally do.
You can keep it a 16-bit image if you like, or you can drop it to 8-bit color by simply going back to Image -> Mode -> 8-bits/channel. That’s it! You’ve completed your HDR processing. Hopefully it turned out well and you’re pleased with the result, but it will almost certainly take practice, so don’t lose heart.
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