HDR with D3200?

Hi I just bought a new D3200 and I'm slightly miffed because I chose it as the most economical option amongst several others I was looking at, and in doing so sacrificed the HDR feature that some of the others had.


Two weeks later and the D3300 comes out and is now on sale in PC World for only £50 more, with HDR.


I was wondering though what my options for taking HDR with this. I suppose it's possible to do manually, but probably very difficult to achieve good results for a number of reason. Is there any way to bootleg this feature onto the camera, or is there maybe a gadget I can connect to the camera that performs this type of photography?
 

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
You setup a tripod, setup the shot, click the shutter, change one of the 4 different light settings and take the next shot, rinse, repeat... the old fashioned way still works... and you can get better results because you can stack as many different shots as you want, rather than the one(or 3) in-camera shots, giving you a better range...
 

Lawrence

Senior Member
The D5100 has HDR built in and from my limited experience I can tell you that doing what Fred suggests produces far better results.
You really aren't missing anything.
Once you have bought something stop looking … there will always be a newer, better, faster and slightly more expensive model than yours being released. That doesn't make yours bad. You have a magnificent camera now give it all the love you can and use it (often).
 

Rick M

Senior Member
The "HDR" feature is a joke. What you really wanted is auto-bracketing which the D3xxx series does not have either. Manually is the only way on those models. Auto bracketing is only available on the D5xxx series and higher.
 

Bob Blaylock

Senior Member
If you have the WU-1a, and a suitable Android device, then you can use DSLR Dashboard to take bracketed sets of photographs. You then need to find some other piece of software that will combine them into a single HDR photograph. I've so far experimented with one called Luminance HDR, but have yet to produce satisfactory results using it.

This thread has inspired me to try some more experimentation, with Luminance, and with at least one other bit of software.
 
Last edited:

Blacktop

Senior Member
You setup a tripod, setup the shot, click the shutter, change one of the 4 different light settings and take the next shot, rinse, repeat... the old fashioned way still works... and you can get better results because you can stack as many different shots as you want, rather than the one(or 3) in-camera shots, giving you a better range...

That's how I do it. I wish I had auto bracketing , but it works this way as well.
 

Iron lung

Senior Member
I personally prefer photomatix to merge to HDR tho as I am using the D3200 also, I am having trouble bracketing shots. It's not the camera though, its a heavier tripod I need.
 

skene

Senior Member
Just steady your tripod with a small weight. And if you do not already have a wired/wireless remote you should invest in one, as it will help alleviate any movements when pressing the shutter.
 
All good advice thanks. I'm sure I'll get there in the end and eventually take some nice pics.

If you have the WU-1a, and a suitable Android device, then you can use DSLR Dashboard to take bracketed sets of photographs.* You then need to find some other piece of software that will combine them into a single HDR photograph. I've so far experimented with one called Luminance HDR, but have yet to produce satisfactory results using it.

This thread has inspired me to try some more experimentation, with Luminance, and with at least one other bit of software.

Do I need to buy a wifi dongle or can't I just connect to my phone (xperia m)? I had a look at one of those apps when I was looking for a remote dongle for doing lapses and long exposures but yet to find one that's any good.
 

Bob Blaylock

Senior Member
If you have the WU-1a, and a suitable Android device, then you can use DSLR Dashboard to take bracketed sets of photographs.* You then need to find some other piece of software that will combine them into a single HDR photograph. I've so far experimented with one called Luminance HDR, but have yet to produce satisfactory results using it.

This thread has inspired me to try some more experimentation, with Luminance, and with at least one other bit of software.

I suppose it should be apparent, by now, that it is possible to take bracketed photo sets with the D3200, either using DSLR Dashboard, as I have suggested, or else with more manual methods.

For me, the trick seems to be getting from there to an HDR image.

I have so far failed to produce any useful results using Luminance HDR. I also tried using Hugin, which is primarily a panorama-stitching program (and works well enough for that purpose), but supposedly also supports HDR merging. I wasn't able to figure our how to get it to do HDR.

Just on a whim, I tried dropping the whole stack of a dozen photographs, on to Microsoft ICE, and got a usable, albeit imperfect result.

HDR_Test_20140517.jpg

This, from the following input photographs:

dslr0068.jpg dslr0069.jpg dslr0070.jpg dslr0071.jpg dslr0072.jpg dslr0073.jpg dslr0074.jpg dslr0075.jpg dslr0076.jpg dslr0077.jpg dslr0079.jpg dslr0078.jpg
 
In some of the HDR photographs I see the colours are really vibrant, do some of the techniques involve adding saturation to the colour balance?
 

Bob Blaylock

Senior Member
I noticed the last 4 photographs were all exactly the same exposure (and aperture and iso)? Is that a deliberate technique to give the dynamic range you are looking for?

No, not intentional, and not something I even noticed until now. Very odd. Must be a failure on DSL Dashboard's part. It ought to have taken all the pictures at 1-stop exposure intervals.

I wonder of having the last four all being the same has contributed to my failure, so far, to produce an acceptable final result. I guess later on, I'll have to try again, leaving out the last three.
 
I just tried the automate>HDR feature in photoshop. Maxes out my 8-core intel i7 processor if I try any more than 5 photos at a time. Produced some pretty unspectacular results with the view out my window, but looked a bit better with some of the dusk/nighttime shots of some hills I took the other night when experimenting. Nothing spectacular but still noticeably better contrast overall.

Is it possible to automate this feature in stages?
 
I just tried this again with some darker conditions, turned out ok but there were some patchy areas again, probably owing to me playing around with the something settings after photoshop processed it. Is there a need for blending layers in before/after HD processing? Such as if you have a sky/foreground combination and you want to give more preference to certain areas each exposure? can you turn up/tone down the colour saturation in some exposures for greater effect?
 
Why wont photoshop let me convert the HDR tiff I saved to jpeg? It wouldn't let me save it as a jpeg in the first place even though it was made from jpegs.
 

Iron lung

Senior Member
Why wont photoshop let me convert the HDR tiff I saved to jpeg? It wouldn't let me save it as a jpeg in the first place even though it was made from jpegs.

You need to change the file from 16 bit to 8 bit. It's been a while since I did that so forgive me if im wrong here but I think you go to mode and change it from there. Photoshop changes the file to 16 bit during the HDR rendering but you need to change it back yourself and only then can you save as a Jpeg. Sorry I Also have you flattened all the layers? Sorry I cant be more persise.
 
Last edited:
You need to change the file from 16 bit to 8 bit. It's been a while since I did that so forgive me if im wrong here but I think you go to mode and change it from there. Photoshop changes the file to 16 bit during the HDR rendering but you need to change it back yourself and only then can you save as a Jpeg. Sorry I Also have you flattened all the layers? Sorry I cant be more persise.

Yep, I'm sure all this was in the options when I was prompted to save the HDR file as a tif. What do you mean by flattening the layers? before or after the HDR photo is created? At the risk of sounding probably a bit stupid, I thought the layers were already flat? That's why they are layers. I take it you don't mean merging.

Anyway the tif files I saved were ridiculously large files, something like 250MB. Can I do this with tif files instead of jpeg, or would that be too heavy on the processor. I think the results would be better though than creating them from jpegs...?
 

Iron lung

Senior Member
Yep, I'm sure all this was in the options when I was prompted to save the HDR file as a tif. What do you mean by flattening the layers? before or after the HDR photo is created? At the risk of sounding probably a bit stupid, I thought the layers were already flat? That's why they are layers. I take it you don't mean merging.

Anyway the tif files I saved were ridiculously large files, something like 250MB. Can I do this with tif files instead of jpeg, or would that be too heavy on the processor. I think the results would be better though than creating them from jpegs...?

Sorry I'm not sure what the problem is then. With regards to the flattening of layers I just mean that sometimes I try to save as a jpeg but I have forgotten to flatten any layers i may have been working on and it flags in ps.
With tiff files of a rediculace 250 meg you might have sone trouble. Try it anyway and see what happens
 
Top