Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
If anything was moving slightly in the scene you were photographing (like water
in a lake, or tree branches in the wind, or people walking by, etc.), you'll have a
ghosting problem, where that object is either blurry (at best), or you'll actually
see a transparent ghost of that part of the image (hence the name). In this hand-
held photo of the Forbidden City, there are people moving in the scene, but in
most cases, fixing that is just one click away.
in Merge to HDR Pro
Step One:
Open the HDR bracketed images in
Merge to HDR Pro (see Step One on
page 175 for more on how to do this).
Here are some settings you can use for
this image: Radius: 175, Strength: 0.25,
Gamma: 0.75, Exposure 0.25, Detail:
300%, Shadow: -100%, Highlight: -50%,
Vibrance: 25%, Saturation 25%, then click
on the Curve tab and create an S-curve
(see page 183 for more on this). Lastly,
turn on the Edge Smoothness checkbox
to enhance the detail and smooth out the
edges. Now, if you look just right of front
center, you see the problem: you can't
keep tourists from moving (well, not with-
out duct tape). You can see what looks
like a semi-transparent version of the
tourist in the foreground (which is why
it's called ghosting).
Step Two:
Luckily, fixing this is pretty darn easy:
turn on the Remove Ghosts checkbox
at the top right of the dialog (it's shown
circled here in red). Merge to HDR Pro
tries to deal with the ghosting by look-
ing for things that are in common in all
your exposures to lock onto and it does
a pretty amazing job of it. Of course,
sometimes it makes the wrong guess
(more likely, if you're creating HDR from
JPEG images rather than from RAW
images), and if this happens, you can
choose which of your bracketed photos
you think it should lock onto, by clicking
on its thumbnail in the filmstrip at the
bottom of the dialog.
