The HDR debate goes on - how much is too much?

Reading through another debate on the HDR flickrgroup - I had to laugh - throughout history fear of change and anything new has always been prevalent.

Portrait painters thought photography wasn't real portrait work because a camera was used.

Fast forward to a generation of film photographers calling DSLR users "computer operators." I still get told I'm not doing photography. They may be right, but that has little to do with it being a digital camera.

Then what is and isn't an HDR. These type of debates will go on as long as someone is afraid of anything different.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If it doesn't look good to you, go on to the next one.

Tonemapping is a dial we use to render an HDR so it can be viewed on an RGB monitor. How high and far we turn that dial is based on what looks good to the person tonemapping the image.

For those who want to rigidly define what is or isn't ... or how far you can turn the above dial, please go lock yourself in that cage and enjoy it.

Meanwhile if I see something I enjoy seeing, the last thing I'm going to do is relegate it to someone's defined subgroup.

I don't like some of my own HDR's but I post them to get feedback on them. The reviews have been mixed and thanks to a few I've made some improvements I believe in what I do.

Lastly someone who 'hates HDR's" is going to anyway no matter which one he or she is looking at. That's the thing about opinions - everyone has one - and they DO vary.

Enjoy what you see, life's too short not to.

My next posts will be on hand held tips and then tonemapping and or processing and may be broken into parts to keep it from being too lengthy.

The image at the start of this post was hand held using the car lot's fence as a pivot.

What is an HDR Part 2 - the shoot

How to take the pictures for an HDR



HDR Photography

HDR Photography Creating high dynamic range images involves a little planning and setup time, but the results can be wonderful. Here's a step-by-step approach to help you ease into creating HDR images.

1. Bracketing
Setup your camera to bracket 3 or more images. Ensure that your bracket covers the entire range of light that is present in the scene.

2. White Balance
Set your white balance to whatever the scene requires, but don't use auto.

3. Mount the camera on a tripod.
Having a stable base for your camera is very important and means less alignment issues in post productions. While hand-held HDR is very possible, and many people create very successful images with this technique, having a sturdy tripod will give you the best results. If you have a model in the scene, just ask them to hold as still as possible for a few seconds.

4. Cable Release
Attach the Cable release, or set the camera to use the self timer. You do not want to touch the camera at all. Even the slightest movement can cause alignment issues with your final images.

5. Switch the camera to aperture priority and make your aperture F8 This step is only to give you a direction in where to begin, let me add that some people prefer to actually shoot at smaller apertures, experiment, and adapt this step to your workflow.

6. Mirrior Lock-up
When bracketing your shutter speeds may get very slow and the mirrior can cause vibrations that blur the image. Mirrior lock-up helps you to avoid the mirrior slap that creates this.

7. Shoot
Now, just take your series of photographs! You have successfully just captured a set of images that will merge into an hdr picture

What is an HDR?

What is an HDR?

There is a debate on in the various HDR Flickr groups, in fact, all over the internet as to what an HDR is or is not. If you want to get into it you can the technical opinion and debate here:

discussion

Flickr photographer with a lot of links about HDR

I'm going to attempt my take on it based on my experience using HDR files at work and at home.

We probably should define it first - the following is from wikipedia - "In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows."

What?

Okay let's try this again from a photography point of view:

Photographers use "dynamic range" for the luminance range of a scene being photographed; or the limits of luminance range that a given digital camera or film can capture; or the opacity range of developed film images; or the reflectance range of images on photographic papers.

Graduated neutral density filters are used to increase the dynamic range of scene luminance that can be captured on photographic film (or on the image sensor of a digital camera). The filter is positioned in front of the lens at the time the exposure is made; the top half is dark and the bottom half is clear. The dark area is placed over a scene's high-intensity region; usually the sky. The result is more even exposure in the focal plane, with increased detail in the shadows and low-light areas. Though this doesn't increase the fixed dynamic range available at the film or sensor, it stretches usable dynamic range in practice.[14]

In the domain of digital imaging, algorithms have been developed to map the image differently in shadow and in highlight to better distribute the lighting range across the image. These techniques are known as high dynamic range imaging.

Whoa way too technical!

See this isn't easy - here's still another - no less obfuscating:

Dynamic range is a term used frequently in numerous fields to describe the ratio between the smallest and largest possible values of a changeable quantity, such as in sound and light.

On imaging it refers to the ratio of the highest and brightest color tone value to the lowest.

For example, a good quality LCD display has a dynamic range of around 1000:1 (commercially the dynamic range is often called the "contrast ratio" meaning the full-on/full-off luminance ratio), and some of the latest CMOS image sensors now have measured dynamic ranges of about 11,000:1 (reported as 13.5 stops, or doublings).[1] Paper reflectance can achieve a dynamic range of about 100:1.


The above comes closer to what I know - the ratio of the darkest part of an image to the lightest.

Cameras - film or digital - can typically provide a 6 f-stop range of light values accurately before it begins to peak at white or black. HDR's attempt to broaden that ratio of dark to light past the point of what your camera interprets.

The image above was a black car reflecting a very bright sky on mostly clear day with a few clouds in the sky. So there was a broad range to begin with. On the image below the afternoon sun lit up the boat while the restaurant and dock cast it's shadows on the water.



So this is a technical definition of what an HDR is - a tonal ratio covering the entire range of light in an image from darkest to lightest.

I'm going to publish this and then go on to how to shoot an HDR my way(s,) in a future post. In my next post I'm going to talk about tonemapping, HDR's, and Single Image RAW file processing.