TIFF's, Bracketing exposures and Photomatix

[Speedster]

Hi all;

Yesterday (08/04/11) Brian Townsend did a mind-blowing webinar, "Image Creation Techniques, Part II".  If you missed it, be sure to download it as soon as it's available up above on the Forum.  You'll want to replay it many times!

Specific to my post was his section on using 32 bit TIFF files in Photoshop, during which he demonstrated an amazing (and inexpensive!) app called Photomatix.  I've been playing with the fully featured trial demo and frankly, I'm stunned at what you can do with it, especially with HDRI imaging.  Check it out at www.hdrsoft.com !

So, it begs the question;  How do you capture (expose?) bracketed images in KeyShot?  I think the possibilities are tremendous if we bracket an "exposure" say +2 and -2 from nominal for further tweaking.  After all, KS is a camera.

By Realtime Brightness?  That's what I'm testing right now.  "Realtime Gamma?  Something else?

Bill G

[chippwalters]

I'm pretty sure there's no need to bracket. The EXR or Tiff 32 bit render options capture the same amount of data for a rendering.

[Speedster]

I'm pretty sure there's no need to bracket

I agree.  My main interest was to see if we can bracket in KS, then play with them in Photomatix to create an HDRI image.  Apparently not.  For some reason, Photomatix will not recognize them as "bracketed exposures".  No matter, as the Tone Mapping and other neat features in Photomatix are well worth the minimum expense.  It's a great addition to our toolbox.

In all honesty, what we can render in KeyShot is HDRI in the first place.  You can see that in all the great work shared here on the Forum.

It reminds me of my third year Photography final exam "way back" in college.  Our professor was a world reknowned photographer, and a peer of Ansel Adams.  For our final, she gave each of us a roll of TriX 120 film (2 1/4 twin lens was the required camera), with her initial on it.  Our assignment was to spend a full weekend shooting our Final image.  But, we were allowed to shoot only one image!  Period.  Then on Monday, she checked each roll to be sure it was hers, then we proceeded to process and print, with no darkroom tricks, the "perfect" image.  That was it, and accounted for 50% of our grade!

I'll never forget what we learned that weekend.  Do it right, and do it once.  And, in KeyShot, in just a few hours at most!  Use Photoshop for creative tweaking as needed with no apologies, but get the base image right first.

I'm having serious problems with creating 32 bit TIFF's, but I'll post that another time.

Bill G