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!