Today we’ll show you the first part of Blinq’s JPEG-HDR tutorial. We need a photo in JPEG format and Photomatix Pro 3.1.

The first thing we have to do is to make three copies of the photo we’re going to use:

When you already have three copies of the same JPEG photo, open up Photomatix and click on “Generate HDR.”

A window will pop up and allow you to choose the images you wish to use. Click on browse and open the three images that we saved earlier, and click ok.

Now, we have to set the exposures of each photo. For this photo, we used 2, 0, and -2. Once you’ve chosen the exposures of every photo, click ok.

The “Generate HDR – Options” window will open. Choose these settings:

Now, here is where it gets tricky. Every photo behaves differently, so you might have to play around the Tone Mapping settings a bit to get the kind of look you want. For our photo, however, here are the settings we used:

When you’re satisfied with how your photo looks, click “Process.” Here’s how our photo looks like so far:

Doesn’t look like an HDR photo yet, does it? Don’t worry, we’re not done yet.

What we did was make 3 versions of these photos with different Tone Mapping settings. Here are the two other settings we used:

And these are the results, respectively:

Now, we have three Photomatix-processed photos. In our next post, we will discuss how we used Photoshop to put these three photos together and create our final HDR photo.

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