There are two steps in making a HDR picture, namely the capture and the processing.

Actually this is the same as with the making of all photographs, but there are differences for the creation of HDR pictures.

I will talk about how I capture images for HDR in Part I, and talk about the processing in Part II.

So firstly, in the capture, the question is, what scene or subject makes for a good HDR picture?

To me this will be one in which the scene's dynamic range is wide, exceeding maybe 5 EV, and where lots of details in the highlights and shadows are necessary for the picture you envisaged, or that it may make a different kind of picture altogether, something not ordinarily seen or photographed.

Secondly the questions are what exposures to capture and at what ...

In Part I, I wrote about the capture of images for processing into HDR pictures.

I need to add something I left out, namely that the capture should be in RAW format and not JPEG.

And the reason is that HDR processing creates lots of artefacts. To minimise this we start with minimising artefacts in the first place at capture. JPEGs create additional artefacts of its own, thus aggravating the "problem" after HDR processing.

Of course it may not be any "problem" at all to your eye and your aesthetics, but it will certainly be if you intend to submit the HDR image for sale as stock photography.

So all the processing discussed here is aimed to attain a processed image quality ...

When you load pictures, in RAW format, to Photomatix for HDR processing you specify what algorithms the processor is to use to correct for camera movements and objects motions in the scene. There are two algorithms for each.

In camera motion correction I usually take the more compute intensive option, ie to align the picture by matching the features in the scene instead of the simpler vertical and horizontal corrections. However sometimes this complex algorithm fails. Then I revert to the simpler one.

In object motion, the algorithms are for the presence of a moving objects, and something Photomatix called "background movement". The latter includes things such as ripples, leaves on trees, etc. Again I usually make Photomatix work harder to treat leaves, clouds and ...

(This is a multi part article. The other parts are here: Part I, Part II, and Part IIA.)

The four tabbed panels below the histogram in Photomatix's Tonemapping screen, are Tone, Colour, Micro and Shadow/Highlights.

Tone works exactly like Levels in Photoshop.

Color fine tunes, via the Temperature slider, the WB set before the HDR was generated. Color also gives control of the saturation in the highlights and shadows, and this may be set together with readjusting the overall saturation, as set by the ...

HDR pictures generated by Photomatix per se are not good enough for stock photos.

There are three main defects that needs to be removed before it is of suitable quality, namely artefacts, high noise levels, and severe chromatic aberrations.

These defects exist even when maximal effort have been taken in the capture (Part I) and the generation (Part IIA and Part IIB) to minimise them. But now there is a high possibility - more than 90% from my experiences - to improve its quality to an acceptable level....