How I make my HDR Sunsets

I choose to use a program called photomatix and Photoshop Elements 6 to make my sunsets and sunrises have a little extra POP.  I wanted my pictures to have a similar look to photographs that use a graduated ND filter, my objective is to make the sunset look as it did when i saw it through my eyes. A digital camera cant capture the wide range of colors that our eyes see, which is why when you expose for a sunset, you normally have the sky a beautiful colour and the foreground silhouetted.

My demonstration / tutorial pictures below should be clickable to view larger.

When I take a sunset picture, I take three exposures(it can be more), usually somewhere around F11, I expose -2, 0 and +2 to give a wide selection of shadows, highlights and colour.

I open photomatix and click generate HDR. I am then able to choose the files, these files are in .raw file format, to select multiple files hold down the ctrl key and click the files you want. Click the open button once you have selected your files.

Once the files have been opened click ok to proceed

The next dialogue box gives you options to change; my pictures were taken on a tripod with a remote I am not to worried about the images aligning correctly.  I have moving water in this image so I make sure the moving water/foliage box is checked

Once Ok is clicked photomatix starts to work on merging the image

These are my three images that I am merging

f22 /5 sec / iso 100

f22 /2 sec / iso 100

f22 /0.8 sec / iso 100

Once photomatix has finished merging the pictures an image will display, click tone mapping and then your image will be ready to be adjusted.

There are lots of sliders to move around, the best thing to do is play with them until you get the look your after, I saved this look as a preset to save time when making HDR sunsets. The smoothing slider was one that took me a while to master, I like to have smoothing set to the slider rather than light mode as I find light mode gives an unnatural effect.

Once I have the image looking as I want I click the process button and prepare to wait (there is lots of waiting in photomatix)

Once the image is processed you must save it, you can either use it as it is or make a few minor adjustments to complete the photograph

The first thing I do when I open my image in photoshop elements is to remove the dust spots, if you click the picture, you will see I REALLY need to get my sensor cleaned! I use the spot healing tool for the removal of  all those marks.

I still always do a levels and a shadows and highlights adjustment, I also sharpen (using unsharp mask) and noise reduction

My final adjustment is selective dodge / burn and saturation to selected areas-in this picture I added a small amount of saturation to the lower portion of the sky and the reflection in the water, I also used the burn brush on low opacity shadows to the sky

In this image you can see the three different exposures I used and then the final result.

This is my finished Sunset HDR (natural looking)

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