I took this shot somewhere in the Upper Snake River Valley, but where and how did I shoot and process this shot?  I was going for the grungy, artistic look when I took this group portrait of five photographers in my Professional Imaging class two weeks ago. We were on our day loop all over the East Idaho upper valley loop.

MYSTERY SOLVED – HDR PORTRAITS – Blending bracketed shots when people move…
Thanks for leaving comments, Aimee and AJ. I am going to add both of you to my drawing one more time, so your chances just got better!  Here are my steps, which took an extra step this time:

So, this was a bracketed HDR image, with three different exposures and some tonemapping in Photomatix, as you guessed. But when you do HDR portraits, it is vital that your live subjects hold very still during all three exposures, so you don’t get ghosts when you blend the images together later. If your subjects move (or if the wind moves any tree branches) you will get “double vision” or two different views of that moving subject. However, it is very easy to remove “ghosts” in Photomatix and it works quite well most of the time. Halfway through the processing, Photomatix pauses and lets you look for any ghosts. In this case, I asked everyone to hold still while I took three shots, but one of them moved their head while I was shooting. So, when I was at the “remove ghosts” step in Photomatix, I used my mouse to drag around the problem area. Then I right-clicked that selected area and it gives you an option to mark it as ghosted. Then you right-click that area again and you can choose which of the three images to use, so you don’t see movement. Then you can go on the left side of the screen to preview the deghosting and see if you like the result. If you need to, you can go back and right click the selection again and choose a different exposure until you like the preview. Then you just process it as normal and it looks great!  So that is how you solve movement in your HDR bracketed images.