HDR Photography

The time has really slipped away since my last post. There has been another assignment on the About forums but I didn't participate in this one due to the fact that I don't have any pets. My wife suggested that we could take pictures of the kids but we decided against that.

There has been a lively discussion about HDR Photography on the forums that I have been following/participating in. For those of you not familiar with HDR Photography, HDR is short for High Dynamic Range. One can find many images out on the Internet using this method. Many of them are really cool while I think some look almost cartoonish (is that a word).

Basically, you take several different exposures of the same image, one underexposed, one exposed correctly and one overexposed. You can take more than three but this is common. Once you have your images, you can load them into one of many different programs out there to combine them into one image. The advantage of this is that you get an image that shows detail in the dark and shadow areas of your image without blowing out the highlights. It also really brings out the detail in an image. I think it really make an image stand out.

You can accomplish much the same thing with one image by making several copies of the image and when you bring them into your program of choice, you can let the program adjust each image for the different exposures.

Here are some examples that I have been playing with. The before picture is on the left and the HDR image is on the right. You can click on the image to view a larger size.





For this next set of images, the original photo is on the top and the HDR is on the bottom.





There are several programs out there that allow you to combine the images in this way.

Here is a quick list and link to each one:

• Photomatix available in a free and paid version. A very popular program
• Picturenaut available as freeware.
• FDR Tools available in both a free and paid version. This site has some nice tutorials on this method.
• Dynamic Photo HDR available in a paid version only. There is a trial download, which I haven't used. I just came across this yesterday. I have used other programs from Media Chance and found them to be very capable and easy to use.

If you are fortunate to own a newer version of Photoshop, you can create HDR images using that application.

Here is a link to the discussion that is happening on the About.com Photography forums. There have been some great suggestions in this thread and the photos are quite spectacular. Drop by, take a look and join in the discussion.