Now what?

[Gregavi]

Greetings,
I am new to this forum and have some questions about processing my photos. I am currently on a 3 week vacation in France and Italy. I have a Sony A77 II and I am shooting RAW. I am also bracketing almost ever shot using +/- 3 with 3 images. I have Photoshop, Lightroom and Photomatix, but only Photomatix with me. I have several questions. First, is it useful to use RAW when bracketing? I read on a photography website somewhere that bracketing RAW images is kind of redundant. That shooting in RAW format sort of eliminates the need to bracket. I'm doing it anyway because I figure it's better to have what I don't need than to need what I don't have. Opinions?
Question 2: I'm wondering what process others use when processing bracketed images for HDR? I usually merge the 3 images in Photomatix and then use Lightroom to make adjustments, and then clean them up in Photoshop if necessary.
Question 3: Is it a good idea, using Photomatix or other program, to merge the 3 photos while traveling into 1 image, discard the 3 originals to save space and use the merged image later for post processing? If yes, should I be saving the merged image in TIFF 16bit since TIFF is lossless like RAW or save as JPEG?
All recommendations, advice and comments appreciated.

 

[weepete]

It will depend on the dynamic range of your scene. Raw will give you a little more headroom than jpeg, so if your scene is within the limits of the dynamic range of your raw file you may be able to take it as one shot. If it's outside the dynamic range of your raw file then to capture the detail in the scene it is a good idea to shoot some multiple exposures under the caveat that your scene needs to be reasonably static.

Personally I know when I'm going to shoot multiple exposures for an HDR as I'll spot meter the scene and will let that tell me the difference between the shadows and the highlights. Sometimes I'll just shoot two exposures, sometimes three occasionalky more but the lighting conditions at the time will determine that.

So no, shooting multiple exposures in raw format is far from redundant.

My favorite method of combining multiple files is using luiminocity masks in photoshop, though it can be more time consuming. Often I'll do a quick edit just by combining the files in lightroom's merge to HDR feature first and seeing how good a job that does. Depending on the result I may edit more or using a different method or I may just scrap the image completely.

Personally I like to keep the raw files, in case I want to edit them again using a different format. I more often just keep the raw files and will process them when I'm back home rather than doing any conversions on site.

It's worth mentioning I use a canon as well, so my sensor is more sensitive to highlight and shadow revovery than the excellent sony sensors so I like to have one good exposure for each part of the scene I am shooting, but you will probably get away with bringing the shadows up and highlights down than I do.

But it sounds to me like you are shooting for HDR without really knowing why you are doing it. I'm a big fan of getting it right in as few shots as possible, so pre-visualise your shot and determine whats needed first then use whatever photographic method you need to get the result you want.

 

[Gregavi]

Thanks WeePete. Something to think about. I'm just starting to use bracketing and HDR so I'm learning my way through it. At this point, I'm just trying to get as much data on the image file(s) as possible and then slowly learn to master the post process part of it. With storage so cheap (as opposed to when I used to spend a small fortune buying and developing film) why not capture as much data as possible, within reason? I understand that capturing a lot of data is not the most important part of good photography but better to have data than not.

 

[dennybeall]

The great thing about shooting raw and keeping the multiple shots is that later on as you learn new techniques and new software becomes available you can go back and process again. The hardest part is identifying the groups of images so that next week or next year you can still put them together.