I've noticed a few people on this site recently asking questions about HDR, so I thought the photo I uploaded today might serve as a helpful example as to why we might choose to use HDR techniques. The shot is of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - an iconic pair of buildings that at night provided a huge range from bright light to deep shadows. Here is my final shot:
The problem with trying to shoot this scene without HDR techniques is that in order to expose for the office windows and detail, the darker parts are completely black. This is a shot at 0.8/sec:
Likewise to expose all of the foreground garden, the incredibly bright lighting on the towers blows right out - 97 seconds:
So the answer is HDR - High Dynamic Range, in this case taking a set of 11 images each 1 stop apart and blending the images to produce a result where each part of the image is nicely exposed.
How to take the images? Well, it helps to be on a tripod so the images are all aligned. Most cameras have a "bracketing" feature that will allow you to take maybe 3 or 5 images. More than that will require a remote device called an "intervalometer", or you can just set the shutter speed for each exposure manually. As an example, the camera's light meter tells you that a night scene should be exposed for 5 seconds, and you decide to take 9 shots at +/- 1 stop - you can do this manually taking shots at 80, 40, 20, 10, 5, 2.5, 1.3, 0.6, 1/3 seconds.
For this shot of the towers, I captured my 11 images using an Android app called DSLR Remote, connected to my camera by a cable with some infrared LED's on the end.
How to process the images? There are heaps of software packages around; I use a free one called Luminance HDR, the most popular is Photomatix, but there are many others. They all do things in 2 steps: (1) They process the input images into a true High Dynamic Range image, but this can't be displayed on a computer screen, so (2) They perform "tone mapping" which brings it back to an "LDR" image that can be saved as a JPEG.
It's the tone mapping that has the potential to give images that "HDR look" that can go from mild to wild - there's big potential here to create a nasty halo effect, especially where objects meet the sky.
Once you have an image as output from the HDR software, you don't need to stop the editing process just yet. It's very common to manually merge parts of one or more of the original captures back in using layers; in the Petronas Towers shot I combined one of the brighter shots of the towers themselves because the HDR output didn't really convey just how amazingly bright the towers actually appear. There are many other techniques that get used, such as reducing the colour saturation on some parts of the image so as to increase the apparent colour saturation in the main subject. Another useful technique is to process the images a couple of times using varying settings, then merge using layers so that just specific parts of the image have the more aggressive settings applied.
This is a huge topic, but I just hoped this set of images might help it make a bit of sense to some who haven't tried this out yet; if you are interested, make sure to search out more detailed info which is available on the Web.
Cool tutorial. I like that you added the bit about what to do after you get the image out of the HDR software. Rarely the shot is as good as it can be right away, some additional work is almost always needed.
That's HDR indeed. Now it's the trick to make the unnatural, seeing everything in the image clearly, look natural. I believe that's where most of the software fails.
For someone that has never shot HDR, I most definitely enjoyed this tutorial (saved it to my handy notebook).. now I'm off to shoot something and hope it resembles an HDR shot for my Get Pushed challenge :-)
Thanks, excellant examples and write up. Several of us are still hoping someone will start up a beginners processing challenge like the camera settings challenge. Mick? Any one? Please?
I personally use Nik Software's HDR Efex plugin, I have used Photomatix in the past but have found that it tends to steer your HDR towards the wild side, away from the subtle that I prefer.
@pizzaboy Of course Mick! However, too often people run de HDR software and click 'ok' as soon as possible, using default settings only. It's a shame :-)
I did a bunch of research before diving into the HDR processing pool. Most of what I saw was the overcooked results and didn't care for it so I thought that was all that could be done with it. Once I saw some images that didn't look like HDR was applied, then I thought I'd like to try it. I'm using HDR express 2 and their algorithms pretty much eliminate the halo effect. Anyway, HDR is a great tool for getting the larger range of tones than is possible for a single shot in certain conditions.
The first time I heard of HDR I thought it was way beyond me. It might actually be but that doesn't stop me from giving it a shot. What's the worse thing that can happen really, create a nightmarish train wreck, oh heck I have files and files of those. So far no photography taste police have come to the house to rescue my lenses or anything.
@mikehamm when you thought you were only seeing the overcooked HDR, you were probably seeing a lot of HDR you just didn't realize was HDR
@tigerdreamer I have thought about that Karen, especially since people are always asking me how I do certain things...but the problem is, how to do a processing challenge that wouldn't require specific software? When I did the AEB camera settings challenge, I think you saw how people wanting to try HDR were finding it difficult since there are so many ways of putting it all together (and programs)
@tigerdreamer I agree with @jsw0109 - it would need to be software-specific, Photoshop really, but would be really useful for lots of people if it could be done.
@jsw0109
I am indeed referring to the nasty-balls brightly coloured puke fest that usually passes as hdr on threads. The last resort for the hopeless photographer, straight after selective colour.
@chewyteeth@jsw0109 One of the problems is HDR gets used to get a "look" for scenes that are low dynamic range anyway. So strange color shifts and high local contrast get associated with HDR, and the images look flat because what little shadow was there is now gone.
@jsw0109 - "when you thought you were only seeing the overcooked HDR, you were probably seeing a lot of HDR you just didn't realize was HDR".
You're right, Jeff. Once I realized that HDR didn't have to be overcooked, by realizing that some images I was seeing were already HDR but weren't overcooked, that's when I decided to give it a try.
@pizzaboy@jsw0109
Just thinking here. If the challenge is say, adjusting levels. A link or write up could be given for ps and gimp, as two common ones, but the real challenge would be about making the most of what levels are and what and how to use them, not the push the buttons stuff, in the camera challenge people dug out their manuals or googled there specific camera.
Sometimes I think I want to do something , but I don't have a vocabulary word to google. The challenge would give me, and others, a place to start the search.
@tigerdreamer if I could figure out a way to do a challenge like this in a way that it wouldn't matter which program a person uses, I'd do it... but it would be nice to know who else would be willing to host processing challenges, kinda like the camera settings challenges are hosted now.
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@david68 Cheers David
I would like to try this one day.
The first time I heard of HDR I thought it was way beyond me. It might actually be but that doesn't stop me from giving it a shot. What's the worse thing that can happen really, create a nightmarish train wreck, oh heck I have files and files of those. So far no photography taste police have come to the house to rescue my lenses or anything.
@tigerdreamer I have thought about that Karen, especially since people are always asking me how I do certain things...but the problem is, how to do a processing challenge that wouldn't require specific software? When I did the AEB camera settings challenge, I think you saw how people wanting to try HDR were finding it difficult since there are so many ways of putting it all together (and programs)
I am indeed referring to the nasty-balls brightly coloured puke fest that usually passes as hdr on threads. The last resort for the hopeless photographer, straight after selective colour.
You're right, Jeff. Once I realized that HDR didn't have to be overcooked, by realizing that some images I was seeing were already HDR but weren't overcooked, that's when I decided to give it a try.
Just thinking here. If the challenge is say, adjusting levels. A link or write up could be given for ps and gimp, as two common ones, but the real challenge would be about making the most of what levels are and what and how to use them, not the push the buttons stuff, in the camera challenge people dug out their manuals or googled there specific camera.
Sometimes I think I want to do something , but I don't have a vocabulary word to google. The challenge would give me, and others, a place to start the search.
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