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What is High Dynamic Range (HDR) in Digital Photography?

I've been hearing a lot about High Dynamic Range (HDR) in the digital photography forums, but I don't understand what it is or why I should care. Yet, people who are talking about it sound very enthusiastic. Can you explain what it is and why I should care bout it?


Dave's Answer:

Sure. HDR is an exciting new trend in digital photography. It solves one of the most difficult problems that just about all photographers face at least occasionally: situations where you have very different amounts of light in different parts of your photographs.

For example, when you take a picture of a landscape at sunrise or sunset, usually you have to make a choice whether to blow out the highlights (bright parts) of the image or lose the details in the shadows. The results can be very frustrating. Similarly, if you take pictures of a person indoors in front of a bright window, you have the same problem. It's almost impossible to get both: details in the highlights and in the shadows.

Basically, HDR software lets you solve this problem by combining the best parts of several exposures of the same image. For example, you take three (or more) pictures of the same shot, where one is very overexposed, one is normal, and the last is very underexposed (photographers call this "bracketing", if you've ever seen that mentioned in your camera user's guide). One will have the highlights correctly exposed, the next the mid-tones are correct, and the final one has the dark areas just right.

Then, HDR software lets you combine all three images so you get the best of all worlds.

Here's a beautiful example of a shot that would be incredibly difficult to take without using high dynamic range digital photographic manipulation:

Photo by rosenbergmikael from Flickr: Creative Commons license, okay for commercial usage
Flickr HDR photo by Mikael Rosenberg, used under Creative Commons license

Perhaps the best way to understand this is to look at examples of photographs that were created using HDR: you'll find that many of these are quite impressive.

Today there are several specialized HDR software programs, including Photomatix, Bracketeer and an exposure-blending plugin for Photoshop CS3. These differ in how you can control creating the composite image, and of course they vary in price.

Audri and Jim Lanford see HDR as one of the five most exciting trends transforming digital photography today and predict that whereas HDR is fairly specialized today, in the future cameras and editing software will have high dynamic range capabilities built in to give you the option to automatically take several exposures and combine them to create compelling images of sunrises, sunsets, clouds, etc.

You can find out more about HDR, as well as four other trends transforming digital photograph at their photo sharing nuggets.com article what's new in digital photography.

PhotoSharingNuggets.com is dedicated to helping people easily share the photos they love. Check out their special report "14 Fun, Easy and Creative Photo Sharing Ideas You've Probably Never Though About" too, which you can get for free by signing up for their Photo Sharing newsletter.

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Categorized: d) None of the Above   (Article 7989, Written by )
Tagged: digital photograph, hdr, high dynamic range digital photography, photo manipulation
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Reader Comments To Date: 2

Cooper Strange said, on April 9, 2008 8:16 PM:

If wielded well, this could be an incredible tool in the digital photographers bag. Of course, as with most tools, it is only as good as the one using it. HDR can very easily look fake or somehow awkward, but with some time to learn more how to use it, it could add a lot.

I think I still prefer the "good ol" method of working to make the photo the best I can when I actually take it, but that is just the way I am.

Cooper Strange said, on April 10, 2008 2:59 PM:

Actually, I have been thinking about this for a while anyway, but when I listened to the newest podcast from The Digital Photography Show (#87 and #86) where they talked about HDR, it piqued my interest again.

Is this really just the same thing as dodging and burning, just with a glorified tool? From the sound of it, it is just like editing layers of an image, and editing specific areas to bring out more detail. It seems you can take HDR much further than just dodging and burning (whether film or digital), but for the most part, it seems all this HDR stuff is already do-able in existing editing software.

Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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