First HDR

Following on my first HDR post last week. I played around with the RAW images I took while on the trip to west coast and clifsfs of moher.

To start off, am using the following softwares:

• Windows Live Photo Gallery - browsing images
  
• PhotomatixPro 3.0 - for generating HDR images from single RAW files and for tone mapping (the most imp. step for HDR processing). And mentioned in various tutorials I read, it does a much better job than Photoshop, so if you wanna do HDR, go for PhotomatixPro
• Photoshop CS2 - for some final cleanups, adjustments. If you generate HDR from different exposures shots, you can do much more stuff in photoshop layering 3/4 different versions of the shot and combining with tone mapped version. As I was using single RAW file, i only did few minor adjustments for filtering etc.

Ok, so here are the original 2 images first (not exactly same, but similar):

Final, HDR processed images:

I like the second one better, the cliffs of moher one. The first seems very blue with clear blue sky and blue water. I didn pretty similar processing on both images. I followed this tutorial on youTube.

One thing, its an evolving exp.; the more you do it, the more you learn and get better in finding the right tone, texture for the HDR.

What do you think, do the images looks any good?

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Some people think, its not true HDR becoz of single exposure RAW file and its just tone-mapping. Anyway just mentioning.

Nikon RAW & Photoshop CS2 Problems

So last time, I posted about HDR and that I wanted to try it on some pictures of mine. And during my recent trip to the West Coast, I took some RAW pictures.

I own a Nikon D40 DSLR and am using Photoshop CS2. But there seems to be some issues with the plugins used in Photoshop CS2 not being able to read the NEF (Nikon's RAW file format).

There is lot of discussion on forums n on flickr about it and after searching in the forums here is the simplest solution (there are all sort of issues being raised in forums about it, uninstalling nikon softwares, re-installing CS2, for some it just works, for some it doesn't etc etc)

The problem lies in the Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop. But the currently avaliable version of Camera Raw i.e. 4.4.1 (supoprts D40) but doesn't support Photoshop CS2, min. requirement is Photoshop CS3. Great, its not that I am using version 6 or 7 of Photoshop, I have CS2, what now. I tried looking for older version of it, again surprisingly Adobe doesn't have any link on current version page to older versions.

Version 3.7 of Camera RAW is right version for Photoshop CS2. But after trying numerous times, I couldn't download the file from Adobe website, the link just doesn't work. Bit shite on Adobe part that it so complicated for such known problem and finding the correct version of Camera RAW. Everyone doesn't have the latest CS3 and why, no backward compatibilty.

Finally, I found version 3.7 here. Download the one for CS2. After downloading the file, go to

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Plug-Ins\CS2

and replace the older version of Camera Raw plugin with the 3.7 version you just downloaded (oh if the link above doesn't work, send me a message n I'll email the right version to you). Back up the version before replacing it with new one, just in case it doesn't work.

And finally, Photoshop is able to read the NEF files, so I'll post some HDR processed shots over the weekend. 

Why can't we make softwares which just work, didn't expected that from Photoshop (thou mebbe its just novices like myself, who get stuck with it).