First of all, Brian, many thanks for taking the time and effort to create and upload the video. I am sure it will help a lot of people on the forum who either want to know how to produce HDR and even more who will be able to use it in order to improve their images by layer masking etc. Awesome work!

As you probably know, I have moved away from using Photomatix and now use Lightroom 3 with the Enfuse plugin. A couple of points about this may interest you and others who use LR3...

Whereas you exported the different exposure to Photomatix as JPEG files from Aperture, LR3 will export directly to Enfuse  (or Photomatix if you have that as well) as TIFF files which, although large, do contain more image information than JPEG files, I believe? Not sure how much difference it makes compared to your results...

I had a go at the images you posted and used Enfuse to merge the exposures as shown below. I have never changed any of the Enfuse configurations as I find them to be great 'as they are'. I kept consistently getting some strange results in Photomatix and some may prefer the 'Enfuse' look over the 'Photomatix' look 

Once Enfuse has merged the images it is automatically re-imported into LR3 where I will generally do a little bit of work on lens correction, the clarity, contrast, and vibrance of the HDR (I tend to also do simple spot-healing if needed). Anything more radical I will use layers for in CS5 using largely the same techniques as you so clearly enunciated. 

My resulting shot is below.

I hope you don't mind this reply to your post - I am in no way trying to hijack your excellent post or detract from the great effort that you have put in. I am just pointing out another couple of options for those who do not use Aperture or PSE...

Once again, terrific work - thank you!!




My result

Thanks Brian great demo.

I've done a few HDR's but never really bothered with the layering as I've never read any books or watched videos on how to before as I stupidly think I should just be able to do it intuitively, and you guessed it... I usually make a mess of it and get annoyed and quit.

I got some great tips there and am really glad you did the note over the screen near the end about the noise

PS Great screen recording program too.

I have been busy with playoff football today but now that I am here and see this, it is on my list of must sees. I will try to check it out later tonight or tomorrow morning. I think this might be right up my alley as I think that I really need to explore the layer masks.

I have a few shots in my head that I am soon going to try to produce that I know that I am going to need to do layers just to get rid of people that are going to show up in my shots. I really hope that layering is going to do my trick so I can't wait to check this video out.

So I am giving you a big thank you well in advance of me even seeing it as you are going to cover an area that I want to figure out.

Thanks!

This is great.. I enjoy Trey's work too.

I really appreciate this workflow walkthrough!!!

This was my output... I dont care for what I did with the left bush.  It's far too saturated, I should've used the burn tool to darken it a bit before saving, but I tried to go through this as fast as I could while watching the end of the playoff game today.

I tried to adjust the permissions on Picasas end so it's public.

Does it show up for you now?

P.S. I also tagged you in the post on Google+ and referenced this forum, hope that is ok.  I really like how easy it is to interact with people on G+ compared to other social networks.

Yep, the photo is there...looks great!  Yours has a "lighter" mood to it.  I like it a lot.

No problem tagging in Google+.

Here's my profile, post yours, I'll give you a follow as well...

https://plus.google.com/114974993988509334124/posts

Cool and thanks! I need to get out and take some more HDR pictures, I love how they turn out when you take a little time to process them.

https://plus.google.com/113381844636510112755/posts