HDR Photography

by Tom Mouat

What is HDR Photography?

• High dynamic range imaging is a way to allow a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard photographic methods.

• Normal cameras take pictures at one exposure level with a limited contrast range. This results in the loss of detail in bright or dark areas of a picture, depending on whether the camera had a low or high exposure setting.

• HDR compensates for this loss of detail by taking multiple pictures at different exposure levels and intelligently stitching them together to produce a picture that is representative in both dark and bright areas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging

"Painterly"

• HDR is also commonly used to refer to display of images derived from HDR imaging in a way that exaggerates contrast for artistic effect.

• In a popular HDR software program this is called the "painterly" mode…

Tone Mapping

• Tone mapping is a technique used in image processing and computer graphics to map one set of colours to another in order to approximate the appearance of high dynamic range images in a medium that has a more limited dynamic range.

How do I take HDR images?

• Exposure is the amount of light allowed to into the sensor during the process of taking a photograph.

• On most cameras you canadjust this manually.

• Take a minimum of 3 shots:– One at -2, one at 0 and one at +2

• USE A TRIPOD!

Process the Images

• Download to PC.• Combine using specialist software.– Luminance HDR ****– Picturenaut ****– FDRTools Basic **– Fusion **– Essential HDR Community Edition **– Photomatix *****************************

HDR Photography Handout

• Get hold of HDR software:– Photomatix (pay), Luminance or Picturenaut (free)

• Work out how to use manual exposure on your camera.

• Get a tripod.• Choose you subject and take at least 3 shots• Download and process.• Enjoy!