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Dynamic Range Increase (DRI) Tutorial for Paint Shop Pro (PSP)

Back to the intro


1. Shoot test photos

The technique works best with highly overexposed areas. For the tutorial I took two photos of my computer room (bear with the poor artistic quality) I left the screen on. The camera is unable to capture both the dark room and the bright screen. First the room:


The screen is heavily overexposed. You can see only a white area with no texture at all. Exif data is f3.2/10.


Then I took another photo with only 1/6:



Now you can see only the screen and some of the stereo's controls.



2. Open them in Paint Shop Pro and merge them

Load the photos (you can just download them from this page photo1 photo2) into PSP. I use 7.02.


Right click the darker photo's name and copy.



Right click the brighter photo's name and click paste as new layer. You should see the darker photo appear. You can close the dark frame's file now.



Toggle the layer palette


Click Layer1 and toggle the glasses symbol. A red X will confirm that the top layer is now invisible. Look at your picture: The dark frame will disappear. You will see the bright frame instead. Make sure that Layer1 is highlighted! Otherwise this will not work.




2. Create a mask to make only the overexposed areas transparent


From the main menu choose Masks, New, From Image.



Set This window and check Source Luminance
.


Uncheck the layer hide and voilą! Our result! Both screen and room are visible. If you look closely you can see that some of the room's walls got darker which wasn't the plan. Apparantly rhe mask is not finetuned properly... Let's fix this.




3. Fine tune the mask


Go to the layers menu and hide the background. Now you can see the ghosty top layer. The dark spots on the walls are our problem. We have to remove them...



Choose Masks from the main menu and click Edit.



From the main menu choose Colors, Adjust, Highlight/Midtone/Shadows



Reduce the value for Shadow. The dark areas should disappear.
Unhide all layers and see the final result...!


DRI test photo: Both exposures have been blended into one single photo. For best results it's recommended to use several photos of increasing exposure time.




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