This is something we wouldn’t usually do, but I’ve really enjoyed chatting with Patrick over the last few weeks. So I decided to get some of our great Photoshop talent together and then put our thinking caps on to see what would could come up with for FStoppers January 2011 Photoshop contest.

To give you a big of background, Patrick had been shooting some basketball shots with the new Pocket Wizard TT remotes for Nikon bodies. Here is the video of his shoot.

Here is the original image that we had to work with.

The direction for our concept was to have the following characteristics.

1. Warehouse styled arena with a few friends watching some dunks
2. Exaggerate the leap of the subject
3. Keep some of the features of the original image
4. Must have a cheerleader (of course!)

And here is what we came up with.

Here is our guide on how we went about the edit.

1. Find suitable background with fitting perspective.
2. Mask the basketball player/hoop/floor/steps, and…
   

It seems impossible, right? You need at least 5 different exposures for every wonderful tutorial on capturing and merging HDR photos with third party software and Photoshop. It’s well worth checking out before diving into some of the more advanced techniques.

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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:

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In this HDR tutorial, instead of using three RAW photos taken with different exposure settings, we used a technique that only requires the use of one JPEG image, an HDR software, and an image-editing software–a technique that is highly useful for photographers who either doesn’t have cameras that are capable of taking photos, or wants to use an action shot to make an HDR photo.

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