July 24, 2014
White-Tailed Ptarmigan Chick, San Juan National Forest, Colorado, And The Capture One Realistic HDR Technique

I had a ball photographing a clutch of White-Tailed Ptarmigan (Lagopus leucurus) chicks about a week ago high up in the San Juan Mountains. It was breezier than I expected to try photographing wildflowers, so took a short hike to check the wildflower conditions further from the four-wheel-drive road. While stopped to watch a pika and a marmot climb over the rocky hillside, I spotted two adult White-Tailed Ptarmigan. They weren't in a good location to photograph them, but as I watched them for a while I noticed that they had chicks! I went back for my long lens and made my way across the steeply-sloped hillside to get in position to photograph the hen (?) and chicks. After a while, they became rather comfortable with me following them and I even had to wait a long time at one point while they all sat down for a morning siesta. They spent most of their time among the thick low Alpine vegetation hunting insects and the chicks were barely visible. But occasionally, they would come out in the open so I could get a better shot.

The Capture One Realistic HDR Technique

I gave a presentation on my workflow to a group of photographers last night, and someone in the audience asked a perfect question when I was describing the Lightroom HDR technique: "Couldn't you use Capture One instead of Lightroom?" I had never thought of trying it, so I tried it this morning and it works! Capture One can operate on a 32-bit file and then process it to create a 16-bit file!

So, for users of Capture One and Photoshop, here's a fantastic way to create a realistic HDR image:

1. In Bridge, select the bracketed photo series RAW files, or already-processed TIFF files, then select  Tools > Photoshop > Merge to HDR Pro…
2. Wait for the images to load into Photoshop
3. Click the "Remove Ghosts" box, set the Mode to "32 Bit", make sure "Complete Toning in Adobe Camera Raw" is off, then click "OK"
4. Wait for Photoshop to create the 32-bit file
5. Select  File > Save As… and save a 32-bit TIFF file
6. Select the 32-bit file in Capture One
7. Use the Exposure, Highlight, and Shadow sliders to develop the file w/o worrying about the typical HDR tone mapping controls
8. Be amazed by the natural-looking results!
9. Process the image to create a 16-bit file
10. Edit the 16-bit file as usual in Photoshop

This is a great update of the Lightroom HDR technique because I no longer have to import the 32-bit image into Lightroom. It's so much easier to just navigate to the right directory with Capture One and click on the image to select it before applying the exposure, highlight, and shadow adjustments!