Foto Friday – I HDR, do you?

Okay, what the heck is an HDR image?

This is one:

And this:

This too:

They are all examples of High Dynamic Range photography or HDR photography.  What’s happening is this:  digital cameras (and film camera too) have a limited dynamic range. Dynamic range is the difference between the lightest area of a picture and the darkest area.  Now when we look at something, our eyes are so amazing because they adjust themselves to compensate – we can “see” into the shadows because our irises open up and we can “see” the bright areas because our irises close down.  Your camera – not as amazing as your eyes. It can’t compensate. So what you do in HDR photography is to take 3 or more exposure of a scene – thereby capturing details, in different shots, for the shadows, highlights, and middle tones.  Then using software like Photomatix Pro or Photoshop, you blend these separate shots together and get some amazing results.

Now this is the original, correct exposure image. Notice the shadows are stopped up and the sky is overly bright.

This is with 3 images processed in Photomatix. Look at how much more detail we gained!

Now here’s where it gets cool. While Photoshop does a good job of combining the files to give you a normal result, Photomatix allows you to alter a lot more settings to get fantastic, artistic results. You can even download presets to apply. This is “grunge” preset.

This is a preset named “cool”.

And this is the “savage” preset!

And here’s my final result. I took the final “grunge” image into Photoshop and applied the Poster Edge filter.

So what do you need? Actually not too much. You’ll need:

• Any digital camera that has the ability to bracket the exposure by shutter speed or a manual setting.
• A tripod – useful but not necessary.
• Software like Photomatix or Photoshop CS2/3/4. Sadly, Elements doesn’t have the feature. Here’s a free alternative that is highly rated but I haven’t used it – Picturenaut 3

My goal is to keep trying and I’ll post the results here. Are any of you using HDR photography and how do you use it? Does anyone have any results they can share? Post it in a comment or in our gallery.

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