http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/hdr_workflow_for_the_rest_of_us.shtml

Cut and paste link into your Browser or highlight the link and right click - "open link in a new window"

HDR Workflow For The Rest Of Us

by Vegard Brenna

Introduction

Alexandre Buisse in A Plea for HDR said it all. He speaks for me. One of my favourite photographic subjects is church interiors (no castles in this part of the world), and HDR is indispensable. But I don’t want my pictures to look like HDR. And I also want HDR to be just another part of my toolbox. Does anyone remember as far back as 2003? That was when we corrected exposure using multiple layers and blending modes in Photoshop, and when we created “fill flash” using clever masks. Now with Lightroom there are simple sliders for them all and more. I think of HDR as an extreme version of Lightroom’s Fill Light and Recovery combined, just a method to get back what I saw and I know was there. Until the “HDR slider” arrives I would like to have something similar and simple.

The tutorial is divided into two parts.

In the first part I will look at the problem of consistent colours in Photomatix Pro, and how it can be solved. The solution applies to any HDR program that creates unnatural but consistent colours. In the second part I will present a workflow “for the rest of us”, where I use what I found in the first part to effortlessly create a consistent suite of HDR images from one shoot – the HDR slider.

MUCH MORE IN THE FULL ARTICLE: