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Hi, and welcome to the Open Beta for Ginger HDR, an HDR tonemapping plugin for After Effects CS3.0+ and Premiere 5.0+. The Open Beta goes until March 1, 2012, so you better get cracking! For download and installation instructions please follow this link:
http://19lights.com/license/ginger-hdr-beta-download.html
Right now we're Windows-only but we're working day and night to get the Mac version up and running. The Mac version is our number 1, 2, and 3 priority. If you would like to get notified when the Mac version is available, please enter your email below.
Once you get Ginger HDR up and running, here are some tutorials on how to use the parameters.
Film Curve Basics:
This first video isn't really a tutorial. Rather it explains how physical film reacts to light differently than a digital camera. You have probably heard from film purists that film has more Dynamic Range than a digital camera. The purists aren't crazy--they're right. In fact with the transition from digital to film we went backwards.
One of the examples in this video shows what happens to skies. If you shoot a picture of your dog on a bright sunny day with film it will look great. But if you shoot that same scene with a digital camera the sky will likely overexpose to cyan or white.
This video explains why that effect happens. On a side note, I think it's baffling that camera manufactures haven't focused more on dynamic range. We've been shooting color pictures for over 150(!) years but the average person still can't take a decent picture outside. If only there was some software product out there that could simulate the look of film with HDR images...
This tutorial gets into the meat of HDR Tonemapping with Ginger HDR. The first thing of course is that when you apply the effect, nothing happens. You have to enable the film curve and then either increase the Shoulder White Point, Toe Strength, or Midtones to see something change. In most cases, I put Shoulder White Point to 1.0, Toe Strength to 0.5, and Midtones to 1.3. You could make a strong argument that we should just make those the defaults.
Ultimately the decision was to keep them as is. When using other HDR Tonemapping programs it's easy to find yourself in "HDR Purgatory". That's when some combination of parameters gives you a look that you sortof like. The catch is that you don't quite know how the parameters work so it's hard to know which parameter is messing you up. With Ginger HDR nothing happens until you make it happen. You don't get thrown to the wolves with default parameters all over the place.
Tutorial #1: Film Curve Settings:
Tutorial #2: Color Adjustments:
One thing that this video doesn't explain as well as we'd like is how the contrast parameters interact with the film curve. If you leave the film curve off then when you increase the contrast the colors will clamp really fast. But if you have a film curve with Shoulder White Point set to a higher value then you get that nice transition at the top end. Essentially, increasing the contrast will force the highlights to shoot past the white ceiling but the film curve will bring them back. The point is that Global Contrast and Shoulder White Point have an interesting and complicated relationship and you should experiment to find the best settings that work for you.
Tutorial #3: Two Level Merge:
Two Level Merge is for scenes where the foreground is really $&*@-ing bright and the background is really %^!&-ing dark, or vice-versa. Obviously this situation happens a lot with skies and windows. The other tools are good for generic edits. But when your scene has two areas with drastically different intensities the Two Level Merge is the best way to get them closer together. If you look closely at the video at the top (the classroom scene) the Two Level Merge is the first control we go for because of the excessive range between the windows and the interior.
Tutorial #4: Local Adaptation:
Local Adaptation is the most powerful and the most dangerous set of parameters in Ginger HDR. If we start seeing forum posts saying "OMG, Ginger HDR suks, it looks horrible and grungy and i hate teh look" it will probably be because someone overused the Local Adaptation parameters. Please don't be that guy.
There are times when Local Adaptation is exactly what you need. It gives you that "mid-level" contrast and we find it particularly useful for enhancing skies with clouds. But don't go crazy and make your kid's birthday party look like a zombie movie.