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| Photo by Jack Howard |
| With some advanced image-editing techniques, it's possible to completely erase moving objects from your high dynamic range photos. Click photo to launch step-by-step tutorial. |
Here at PopPhoto.com, it's our responsibility to stay ahead of the curve on imaging trends and technologies. One of the emerging trends we've been out front on is high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) – see our first HDRI tutorial – a technique that pushes the boundaries of digital imaging by merging a series of photos into a single frame with greatly increased tonal detail.
We recently demonstrated how the new "Smart Stacks" feature in Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended can be used to remove unwanted elements from your photos.
Taking the Smart Stacks feature a step farther, we'll now show you how to use Smart Stacks and bracketing to create a pristine High Dynamic Range image free of unwanted tourists and vehicles!
For our source images, we visited the Red Mill at Clinton, NJ, a photogenic old building beside a millpond and next to a truss bridge that leads to the downtown district. Everyone captures this building from the same spot across the pond – it's on tourist brochures, phonebooks, postcards and more – so they might as well just permanently install a tripod for everyone to use!
But every one of these photos looks the same. We wanted a different image of this overly exposed piece of Americana. We decided to focus on the classic truss bridge and use the mill as a background element. But we wanted a clean shot of just the bridge without the endless stream of foot and vehicular traffic you'll encounter at noon on a beautiful summer day. It's the perfect situation for both High Dynamic Range Imaging, due to the challenging high-contrast lighting, and Smart Stacks "Tourist Erasing," due to the constantly moving elements against a static backdrop.
Our tools included a tripod, cable release, one huge CF card and a DSLR with a serious Auto Exposure Bracketing sequence. In this case we chose the Canon EOS 1D Mark III with the Canon 17-40 f/4L and a Tiffen Circular Polarizer to burst 14 7-shot Auto Exposure Bracketing sequences at +/-1 over the course of 10 minutes. From these 98 shots, we gathered enough frames at each shutter speed to make a 9-layer Smart Stack at each exposure level effective at eradicating the tourists and cars.
Then once we had a tourist-free Smart Stack source image at each exposure level, we merged these into a 32-bit HDR and Tonemap with three different programs to see which output file we liked the best. And what's the result? Follow our slideshow tutorial to find out!
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