HDR Photography

This is a test jump into HDR photography. Hopefully it develops as I learn more, but it was so interesting I just took a leap at it.

Faux HDR

• First off, I cheated at this. I took 1 picture (which wasn't really a great picture to begin with) and manually manipulated the colors to over & under expose. For the first test I wanted to see the merge results.

Underexposed

Original

Overexposed

• The results were rich in color. I shifted between 2 exposure spaces and the latter of the two was the richest.
• Having seen the combined difference, I'll work on learning on the Powershot S3 how to manipulate the over/under exposure and see what a true light picture results with.

Combined - 2 Stops

Combined - 4 Stops

Real Test 1: Flower Pot

• Flower pot on Porch. I took this a few hours after the faux test. Much better
• Pictures one and two are cropped sections of the flower pot. Note the detail in the HDR version.
• Picture three is the full HDR picture
• Picture four is a combination of all of the exposures (marked) and a grayscale strip to show the differences.

Original - Cropped

HDR Cropped

HDR Full

Exposure Ranges

Real Test 2: Tower

• 21 pictures ranging in exposures
• Noted that there is a need to drop overly exposed pictures (95% white) from the batch

Original

HDR

Real Test 3: River

• 17 pictures ranging in exposures

File:Hdrtest-river-original.jpg

HDR

Programs

• HDR Shop - V1 is free for non-commercial
• Photomatix - The older version is free (no tone tools)
  • Apparently no alignment options
• Photoshop C2 or higher

References

• The Future of Digital Imaging - High Dynamic Range Photography - John Meyer
• Modern HDR photography, a how-to or Saturday morning relaxation
• HDR Tutorials Roundup - Digg.com
• HDR Tutorial: How to create ‘High Dynamic Range’ images using Photomatix