On my last trip to New York City, I had planned for a few HDR sessions during my stay, mixed in with some editorial shooting in NYC.

Image Info

For this HDR “making of”, 5 exposures were taken with a Nikon D700 + Nikkor AF-S 16-35mm f/4 G ED VR with the following settings:

exposure time: 0.6s (0EV), 1/6s (-2EV), 0.3s (-1EV), 1.3s (+1EV), 2.5s (+2EV)
focal length: 16.0 mm
aperture: F10.0
ISO: 200

Before taking the shot (see location), I waited for a bus to come into the frame for the longest exposure. Fortunately, the Lexus was parked and wasn’t moving in any of the frames, making the contrast between the car/bus trails and the motionless car more striking.

RAW exposures

HDR Exposure (realistic version) processed in Oloneo PhotoEngine

HDR Exposure (extreme version) processed in Oloneo PhotoEngine

The Final Result (full HD wallpaper)

The Making Of

The Video

The steps

For this making of, the following steps were undertaken.

1. Image alignment: it so happens from time to time that the tripod is moved slightly in between exposures. To fix this, I used the “load files into stack” script in Photoshop and repasted the corrected TIF into its original file.
2. dual HDR processing in Oloneo PhotoEngine (if you haven’t checked the review, it’s here): The first tonemapping was fairly realistic and would be used as a basis for the image, then a second tonemapping was applied and would be used for certain parts of the image.
3. manual blending of the two HDR generated
4. semi-automatic blending of the sky of one of the exposures using selections composites.
5. manual blending of the bus/car trails and hot spots
6. local contrast adjustments using blending modes such as soft light and normal blending modes
7. sharpening and edge sharpening using low and high radius high pass sharpening
8. special effects

David Giral is a published Montreal/Toronto based editorial and commercial professional photographer specialized in architecture, interiors, portrait and travel photography.

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright David Giral (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without permission from David Giral.

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