HDR Shadow Mapping

From Scott Wyden Imagery:

One of my favorite techniques that I use on many HDR images is a trick I call Shadow mapping. Credit goes to Christian Bloch for this technique, although I’ve made a few changes to the original recipe to suit my personal style. I use this primarily with Photomatix Pro from HDRsoft, but have also pulled it off using HDR Expose and HDR Express from Unified Color.

This can get a little involved, and screen shots are helpful. If you’re interested, please see the link to the full tutorial at the bottom of this post.

To start, merge your set of brackets in the usual fashion, but be sure to save the HDR file (Radiance, OpenEXR, etc.) before going into the tone mapping process, as you’ll be opening that file several times.

Once you’ve saved the 32-bit HDR file, tone map it with the default settings to get a baseline version of your image. Save the output as a 16-bit TIF file with a file name that includes “default” but do not load it into Photoshop, yet. You’ll notice that like many tone mapped images, this one looks a little flat.

Click here for the entire tutorial with pictures.

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