Just a quick reminder that following on from my Corel HDR webinar last week I ‘ve got a free download copy of Corel PaintShop Pro X4 to give away. All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning it is register on gopaintshoppro.co.uk. To do that, just click the register link at the top of the page. All I’m looking for is your email address, I don’t want to know your life history and I won’t spam you or pass this info on.

What else does registration get you? Right now not a great deal. Ok nothing! But if enough people are interested there’s every possibility I’ll add content to the site in the form of tutorials for registered users only. Or maybe we could have a forum, or something. And if I get run over by a bus tomorrow, at least you had the chance to win a copy of PaintShop Pro eh? So what are you waiting for? You’ve got until midnight (UTC) Friday.

Apart from a the chance to win a free copy of Paint Shop Pro what does registration get you? Absolutely nothing! I’ve just opened the site for registration so, until some people register I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do but it’ll most likely involve some content for registered members only and, who knows, maybe even more giveaways.

Hope you can make to to the webinar!

This short video tutorial shows you all you need to know to create an HDR (High Dynamic Range) shot using Corel PaintShop Pro X4. The HDR features in PaintShop Pro X4 have been radically revamped, so if you were disappointed with what X3 offered, this is the best excuse yet for an upgrade! I’ll take you through the basic features and show how to use them to produce a stunning HDR shot that really pops.

I hope what you find here on the website will convince you it’s a worthwhile purchase. If it does, please help me out by following the links on the right to buy from Amazon. That way I earn a few extra pennies for each copy sold, which means I can spend more time adding new stuff here and working to make the next edition even better.

Thanks!

Ken

Whatever you think of HDR, it looks like it’s here to stay. A lot of people are put off by the aggressive tone mapping that’s used in many HDR images, rendering the scene more like a painting or illustration than a conventional photo. That’s given HDR a bit of a bad name and led a lot of people to assume that it’s good for nothing. Not so. HDR, or High Dynamic Range images are a really useful way to capture the full range of tones in a scene, particularly when that range is beyond what the camera sensor is capable of recording in a single exposure.

Before we get started, if you’re using an older version of PaintShop Pro, the new HDR Exposure Merge in PaintShop Pro X4 (it replaces HDR photo merge in X3) is a big improvement on earlier versions and well worth upgrading for.

The basis of HDR is that you combine several shots taken at different exposure settings, so first a word about that. You’ll need to shoot at least two bracketed exposures a stop apart, I’d recommend you shoot at least three and, if you have the patience, five won’t do any harm. Some cameras have a continuous shooting mode that will do this automatically for you. If not, choose aperture priorit exposure mode and manually bracket with one correctly exposed frame and for at +1, +2, -1 and -2 EV. e.g. if the correct exposure is 1/500th at f8 shoot four additional frames also at f8 but with shutter speeds of 1/250th, 1/125th, 1/1000 and 1/200th. The reason you change the shutter speed and not the aperture is to maintain the same depth of field in each frame. Finally, it helps a great deal if you put the camera on a tripod, or rest it somewhere steady, and HDR works best with fairly static subjects.

Here’s what your five bracketed shots should look like

Import your five frames into PaintShop Pro X4, select them in the Manage workspace and choose File>HDR>Exposure merge.

The merge window has a number of options the first of which is the Camera Response Curve Profile. I’m a little sceptical of this as it lists manufacturers, rather than individual models and seems to make little difference to the end result, but you’re welcome to give it a try if your camera manufacturer is listed, otherwise just leave it on the default Auto Select.

The next section on the Merge Settings window is for alignment, if you shot using a tripod you won’t need this, but for hand-held shots you can experiment with edge-based or feature-based alignment to see which produces the best results. Ignore the Custom editing tools for now, I’ll come back to those a little later. Just head straight to the bottom and click the Process button.

You’ll now see the HDR composited image previewed in the Adjustments window. This is the result using the default settings, you can choose from one of six presets to apply a range of adjustments to alter the white balance, saturation and Tone mapping. It’s the last of these that determines how the tones in the original frames are combined and how the vast range of tones in a 32-bit floating point HDR image are mapped to more limited tonal range in a 16 bit per channel integer file.

Check out some of these presets. I actually think the default result provides a good balance in terms of tonal reproduction, white balance and colour saturation. But if you prefer a slightly more stylized look the Default 1 preset is where it’s at. If default 1 is a little too much for you, the Default 2 preset is less full-on. Default 3 is like Default 1, but with darker midtones and shadows and less vibrant colours. The remaining presets provide variations with, among other things, varying saturation or vibrancy.

The other thing that differs between the presets and that’s worth experimenting with is the last pulldown menu which provides two options, Natural detail with three sliders for adjusting local tone mapping in the shadows, midtones and highlights and Creative details with sliders for strength and block size. You can reset things back to the initial processed settings by clicking the reset button at the bottom of the adjustments pane. And, once you’ve found a combination of settings that works for you, you can save it as a preset of your own by clicking the disk icon at the top of the panel.

Once you’ve got the HDR image looking the way you want it you can click the ‘Create HDR file’ button. This doesn’t create an image file but saves the HDR settings so that you can reopen and continue editing later. Unless you want to do that, click the Process button to apply your settings.

The Fine tune window allows you to do just that, make minor changes to tone and colour as well as remove noise from the image and apply sharpening. When you’re happy with how everything looks click the save and close button and choose the .pspimage format to save the file as a 16-bit per channel RGB image.

It’s looking good, but we’re not quite done yet. You don’t have to look too hard to see that there’s a problem with this HDR composite image. The boats on the left and right of the frame have moved between exposures and caused ‘ghosting’ in the final composited result. This is one of the big problems that you’ll frequently encounter when shooting HDR, you can avoid camera movement by using a tripod, but people, water, vehicles, and even trees have a habit of moving around and there’s not much you can do about it. Or is there?

Lets go back to the Merge screen in HDR Exposure Merge (click the Back button twice). Under custom editing you’ll see a selection of tools for holding back and forcing parts of the image in each exposure. The Auto brush tool is worth a try, though I’ve had limited success with it. It analyses each frame to determine what parts of the subject have moved between exposures then brushes them out. Give it a try and see how it works for you. If nothing else it can guide you to where the problems might be. Click the Auto brush button and after a few seconds you’ll see the problem areas painted in red on each frame. Now click the process button to create the HDR Exposure Merge using those settings.

If you don’t like what you see click the Back button and this time use the Brush out brush to manually paint out the problem areas. You’ll have to decide how many of the frames you need to apply the brush out to, but it’s probably best to assume your subject has moved and is in a different place on every one of them, so brush out the offending detail on all but the middle exposure. A far quicker and easier way to do this is to use the Brush in tool and paint the same areas on the exposure that you want to use. Here (above) I’ve brushed in the two boats on the centre (correct) exposure and this automatically brushes out those same areas on all the other frames.

The disadvantage is that you won’t get any HDR goodness in the brushed in/out areas because only pixel data from a single exposure is used.  You can use the Eraser to remove any accidentally applied brush in/out paint.

Here’s the result with both of the boats brushed in on the centre (correctly exposed) frame.

Corel AfterShot Pro

The announcement is welcome news for Corel PaintShop Pro users. PaintShop Pro X4 provides Raw Processing tools as well as image management features, but the tools provided in Camera Raw Lab are relatively unsophisticated. And while PaintShop Pro X4′s Manage workspace provides useful tools for adding metadata and organising image collections, it lacks more advanced metadata handling and isn’t well suited to processing large numbers of photos. AfterShot Pro offers extensive metadata tools and sophisticated Raw processing tools along with non-destructive adjustments, selective edting, and fast, powerful batch processing.

AfterShot Pro was announced at CES in Las Vegas. In a blog post about the announcement Corel’s Executive Vice President and General Manager, Chad Kinzelberg said:

Corel AfterShot Pro takes the best of Bibble’s technology and layers in some of Corel’s skills in user experience design, QA and global sales and marketing. The other great thing about bringing the two companies together is that our development teams have been able to work closely with the Bibble and PaintShop Pro communities to get feedback throughout the beta cycle of the new product. This is one of the best parts of the process for me since it means that we’re getting immediate and valuable feedback at every stage of the cycle. With Corel AfterShot Pro, users will be able to rapidly import, catalogue, browse, search, edit, convert, print and output photos and get back to doing what they love best-taking great pictures. Corel AfterShot Pro shines on performance. Its multithreading engine makes it the highest performance product in its category and this improves virtually every aspect of the application. When it comes to the most common photo workflow tasks like opening catalogues, performing searches, loading and editing images, and creating final output images, AfterShot Pro is markedly faster than any of its competitors. For a photographer working with hundreds, if not thousands of RAW images at one time, this performance advantage makes a huge difference to their overall productivity.

Check back for my full review of AfterShot Pro and upcoming tutorials.

Incidentally, there’s been a lot of jiggery pokery with the PaintShop Pro branding since Corel took the helm, here’s the recent chronology if you’re using an older version and want to know how many generations out of date you are:

PaintShop Pro X4
PaintShop Photo Pro X3
PaintShop pro Photo X2
PaintShop pro Photo X1
PaintShop pro Photo X
PaintShop Pro 9
PaintShop Pro

Even if you’re working with PaintShop Photo Pro X3 you should seriously think about upgrading as the new interface design makes life so much easier and help you to better organise your workflow. The new design divides the workspace on three tabs – Manage, Adjust and Edit.

The User Interface

The Manage Workspace

This screen grab shows PaintShop Pro X4′s Manage workspace. There are 4 areas – the Navigation palette over on the left, the Organizer palette in the middle, and the Preview palette on the right with the Info palette underneath it. The Navigation palette has two tabs so you can browse all the files and folders on your computer or organise the Collections tab with only those folders that contain photos. You can also create Smart Collections (saved searches) on the Collections tab. In Preview mode, shown below, the Preview palette moves centre stage and the Organizer drops down below it. You use the Manage workspace to review, delete, tag, caption and otherwise organise your photos. There’s also a Quick review mode (double-click a thumbnail to enter it) that shows images full screen with zoom, rotate, delete and rating tools.

The Adjust Workspace

The Adjust Workspace replaces what used to be called Express Lab. Here you can carry out ‘everyday’ editing – rotating, cropping, tonal and colour correcting and even a bit of retouching with the Red-eye and Makeover tools. If you’re not too confident about how to improve the look of your photos in terms of tone and colour the Smart Photo Fix Tool can take care of that for you.

The Edit Workspace

If you’re still working with a very old version of PaintShop Pro, the Edit workspace will be the most familiar to you, but even that has changed a lot. This is where you’ll find all the ‘conventional’ photo editing tools and features – Selection tools, Layers, Layer masks, Adjustment Layers, brush tools, text etc.

These three workspaces provide the opportunity to establish a workflow for your photo editing, but you don’t have to use them. You could just dive straight into the Edit workspace, open a photo from your hard drive and get stuck in, which is probably what you do now if your using an older version of PaintShop Pro.

New features

As I’ve said, I think this division of the PaintShop Pro UI into tabbed workspaces is one of the highlights of PaintShop Pro Photo X4. But there are some other new features you might also be interested in. Here’s a brief tour of the major new features and what you can expect from them.

HDR tools

The old HDR Photomerge has been replaced with a completely redesigned feature called HDR Exposure merge. This is a massive improvement with a new merge algorithm that’s much more effective than the old one and an interface that’s much easier to use and includes a variety of presets. There’s also a new Batch Merge feature that works on multiple bracketed sets of photos.

Camera RAW Lab

Revised with a much larger preview area, a histogram and new highlight recovery options.

Fill Light/Clarity

Fill Light does the same thing as the old Fill Flash tool, only much more effectively. Clarity is a local contest enhancer that makes your pictures pop.

Vignette

It adds a vignette. Not the most exciting tool in the box, but look at how popular vignettes have become.

Facebook and Flickr sharing

Truth be told, PaintShop Pro X4′s new Flickr and Facebook up loaders are quite poor, even for a first effort. You’re better off sticking with the web-based uploaders.

Selective Focus

You know that tilt-shift effect? Some people aren’t heartily sick of seeing it everywhere. If you’re one of them you’re going to have a lot of fun.

Photo Blend

This is another of the new features that I’m not altogether in love with. The idea is great, you can combine the best bits of several photos to produce one good one. The implementation, sadly, is not cool. It only really works if you have the camera mounted on a tripod and the subjects don’t move around too much. I’ve had very limited success with it on handheld shots, but it might work better for weddings and other situations where people are formally posed.

That’s it for my quick round up of the interface improvements and major new features in PaintShop Pro X4. If there’s anything important  you think I’ve left out, or you don’t agree with, feel free to comment. Check back for upcoming tutorials on how to use some of these new features, and look out for the latest edition of my book PaintShop Pro X4 for Photographers due out from Focal Press in February 2012.

And here’s the shot from the Olympus Pen Mini E-PM1 using the Dramatic Tone Art filter.