HDR Gone Bad

It’s a novelty look and I’m over it. It was cool for a very short time, then everyone decided they wanted to have surreal images. It’s not that hard of a look to achieve, so it’s not that impressive. Get over it.  :-) I much prefer to use HDR for what it was meant for… which is giving a slightly wider dynamic range to create a shot that has similar contrast and color range to what your eye actually sees. No one has seen colors like the photo above has. Alright, well, yeah I’ve taken mushrooms too, so maybe then… but not normally.

The better use for HDR…

Given the normal photo below:

We can use multiple exposures to create the wider dynamic range we’d like to see in a single photo, but can rarely achieve due to the limitations of sensors, file formats, etc. Even when used properly, HDR isn’t without its problems. However, you can frequently get beautifully life like photos that would be difficult to achieve normal. The example below gets the point across (although I’m not holding it up as a shining example of photography, it is good enough to get my point across though):

What you get is more detail in the shadows and highlights than what you’d normally see. You can tease some of this detail out when working with RAW files, but not to the extent you can when you have multiple photos. Of course, multiple photos means you can have ghosting and other artifacts to deal with, so that’s always a consideration.

HDR is a cool technique and can produce some amazing photography work. The surreal look does, I’m sure, have a time and place, but realize that’s not what HDR was designed for.

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Let’s talk about how. Here’s the original image for Gomediazine.com:

Here’s some 3D text I whipped up in 3D Invigorator in about 15 minutes:

This isn’t a perfect recreation. I didn’t spend that much time on it. And, of course, if you want the explosion and lightning, you’ll need to go through the gomediazine.com tutorial as they teach you how to do that. I’m just here for the 3D text. I wanted to show some of the possibilities of 3D Invig and on a basic level how I created it.

In the 3D Invigorator tutorial sections, the basic video tutorials go over how to move and rotate text and lights, so I recommend checking those out. They’ll tell you everything you need to know about positioning the text as I have here.

The debris around the text is a little trickier. 3D Invigorator doesn’t really have a great way of generating random polygons for this purpose. So… enter Adobe Illustrator.

I used Illustrator to create some debris. Just by going in and scribbling with the wacom pen and creating some squares and triangles. Here are a couple debris files:

Since 3D Invigorator can accept Illustrator Files (you need to save them as Illustrator CS files though!), I just imported these, rotated and scaled them a bit and instant debris! Obviously with a little more effort you can create just as much debris as the original had.

So that’s a quick way of adding random elements to the text you create in 3D Invigorator. There’s no limit to the number of objects that can be added to an Invigorator scene. So feel free to whip up all sorts of cool shapes in Illustrator to accentuate your text.

HOT TIP: You can save your scenes! Go to File>Save Scene… If you’ve created a really big setup and spent a lot of time working on it, make sure you save it. If Photoshop crashes or the power goes out you’ll (as usual) lose everything if it’s not saved.

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