Travel Photography - Bracketed Photos

Quick Question for the Board:

Before I was smart enough to start shooting RAW with my Nikon D50 last year, I shot a lot of bracketed photos. Looking back into the archives, I now have tons of images in sets of three, each part of the set having slightly different white balances. The logic was that, one day, when my post-processing got more sophisticated, I'd be thankful that I took them and know what to do with them.

Today, I shoot RAW and use Lightroom, which I'm slowly but surely learning to use (and love). My question is--is there anything that I can do with the bracketed image sets besides treat them as individual jpgs? Is there a way, for example, so, err smush (that's a technical term) them together into a single image with more RAW-style image flexibility? Or other suggestions for how to capitalize off of the images that I'm otherwise not using?

Thanks so much.

You can use LR to do everything you can with RAW files to the jpegs (with some limitations and restrictions). Start by picing the best exposure and using the tools just as you would a RAW image.

If you bracketed because the dynamic range of the scene was too great, and all 3 images in the set were clipped at either end, you need an HDR tool like Photomatix or Photoshop. Photomatix has a plug-in for LR, and Photoshop obviously interacts out of the box.

Google also turned up Enfuse (http://www.photographers-toolbox.com/products/lrenfuse.php) which claims to do blending right in Lightroom.

For ease of managing, you can stack the images in LR so you don't see all 3 of every image.

(the above assumes you actually have a range of exposures, not a range of WBs, which would be hard to do to any significant degree unless you really tried)

.....I now have tons of images in sets of three, each part of the set having slightly different white balances.

Today, I shoot RAW and use Lightroom, which I'm slowly but surely learning to use (and love). My question is--is there anything that I can do with the bracketed image sets besides treat them as individual jpgs? Is there a way, for example, so, err smush (that's a technical term) them together into a single image with more RAW-style image flexibility?

In general, if you bracket white balance, your 3-shot set will have some differential in color temperatures (cool to warm, or warm to cool, depends on your settings). As up-post said, you need a tool to "merge" them together, and mentioned 2 such tools. I use Photoshop (Ps) to do the merging and blending. I shoot bracketed shots by varying the aperture instead of the WB. I get a HDR effect by merging such shots. In other words, I am looking for wider range in highlights & shadows. I have no idea what the end result looks like by merging WB shots together, since I have not done it.
Suggest you try to download Ps for a free 30-day trial and experiment with your shots, and take it from there.
LR can't do multi-shot merging without appropriate plug-in.

for me, i use photomatix for the HDR merge and then output to tiff. then use the tiff file in lightroom for the rest of my flow. photomatix has a lightroom plugin i believe, but i have not use it.

photomatix has a 'trial' mode where some of the outputs have watermarks, but there is no time limit.

It's great that you're bracketing, and I'm sure that lots of the time you'll have one photo that has everything you need without resorting to HDR. Why not just throw away the ones that are really over and under? Heresy, I know, to the "I've got 2,000,000 photos on my hard drive!" crowd, but does anyone really need to keep shots that are two stops off where everything is properly rendered in the normal exposure?

Keep in mind that for the bracketed shots to really work as an HDR, they need have been shot on a tripod. Photoshop, at least, has one heck of a time trying to merge photographs that are even a bit out of alignment.

Keep in mind that for the bracketed shots to really work as an HDR, they need have been shot on a tripod. Photoshop, at least, has one heck of a time trying to merge photographs that are even a bit out of alignment.

Photomatrix does an excellent job of aligning images like this, in my experience. I've shot dozens of handheld HDR images and with a bit of work they turn out well. It certainly helps if you are standing in the one spot, make absolutely no changes to zoom or aperture, and take the 3+ photos in very quick succession.