High Dynamic Range Image

I can’t say I’m an expert, but I have played around with HDR in the past.   Now that we have Photoshop CS6 we have a lot of new tools to play around with.

HDR is a method of capturing a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image.

Cameras aren’t all that good at seeing in dark and light at the same time.  They can take one of the other and you lose a lot of detail in either end of the range.  They have a low range as it were.   Imagine if you could take several photos each at a different shutter speed and get a range of images showing all the detail from the dark areas up to the light areas.   That’s where HDR comes in.   Most modern cameras have a bracketing setting which automatically takes several (3 in my case) photos at the same aperture, but at three different shutter speeds.  I end up with overexposed, normal and underexposed pictures.

 

The middle photo is what I would normally be left with.  but the clouds are blah and the ground under the car is too dark. PS CS6 (and maybe 4 and 5) have an HDR option.    Photoshop takes the three images and looks at the light and dark areas to come up with the average photo.  And it looks pretty average.  Very flat and grey and washed out.    But this image now has three times the information that a normal photo would have.  This gives you more information to play with.  Bring out more colour, brightness, sharpness.  Playing around with the settings can eventually produce something like this:

It looks slightly surreal, but that’s kinda what we’re going for.  See how you can see under the car, but the clouds are still grey.    As you can tell from above, if the clouds show at their true greyness then the underside of the car is too dark.   Google HDR and you’ll see a range of images from photorealistic to pretty surrealistic.  Almost all photos in magazines and commercials use HDR.  If your camera has bracketing and you have photoshop, or photomatix (which has a free cut down version) I really suggest you try out HDR.  It’s amazing what you can come up with.