HDR Technique for Wildlife Images

September 16th, 2009

Yesterday I posted this image of a bighorn sheep that I took in Custer State Park in South Dakota. What’s interesting about this picture is that it’s an HDR. You might be wondering how I made an HDR image of an animal since HDR requires multiple exposures and there’s no way an animal is going to stand still long enough to do that. I actually created the multiple exposures in Lightroom, not with my camera. So I guess you can say it’s not true HDR, but a pseudo HDR.

Here’s how I did it.
Since I shoot everything in RAW I have quite a bit of flexibility with my images. So instead of taking 5 exposures of the bighorn, I only took one. Then I exported 5 different exposures of that image from Lightroom using the Exposure setting under the Develop tab. The first image was exported at -2, the second at -1, then neutral, +1 and +2. All of these exports were done to the straight RAW image. No other post processing was done.

I then imported those 5 images into Dynamic Photo HDR and made the HDR image. Amazingly I didn’t have to make that many adjustments from the default tone map. Just a few adjustments to the brightness and gamma and then I adjusted the light radius, light strength and surface smoothing until I got the results I was looking for.

Here are the five images I exported from Lightroom, beginning with the -2 exposure.

Here’s a comparison of the original image with some post processing and the HDR with some post processing. Click to enlarge the image.

Notice how the sheep in the HDR image looks so much more alive than the other one. It’s all in the eyes. The eyes in the HDR image have a more natural, lively look to them. In the normal image the eyes are kind of muddy and dull. In the HDR there’s also much more detail in the shadowed part of the face and more contrast overall to the horns and fur. I also feel that the HDR image has more of a three dimensional feel to it. The sheep seems to pop out from the background. All in all I feel the HDR image is a huge improvement over the normal one.

So far this is the only wildlife image I’ve tried this technique on, I don’t know why it wouldn’t work in most situations though. I’ve also used this technique on landscape images. Sometimes it works great, other times it just makes a mess. It all depends on the image.

One other note, I used Dynamic Photo HDR in this example, I’m not sure how this would work in other HDR programs. I own Dynamic Photo HDR and Photomatrix. I’ve found that they give very different results with the same images so I use whichever one gives me the results I’m looking for with the image I’m working on.

Give this technique a try. It’s interesting to see how it can improve your images.

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