petemc.net— The main aim of this tutorial is to help people use HDR techniques to produce photos with a higher dynamic range than they normally get in a standard out of the camera photo.
Oct 29, 2006View in Crawl 4
"nearly every hdr image ive seen..."You've never seen any.This is a fundamental misunderstanding of high-dynamic-range photography. With normal JPEG photography, you capture no more color data than you can display. Your display is 8-bit, so the camera only captures 8-bit color.With raw photography, you capture more color than your can display. But in order to see your picture, you have to process it through a look-up table or other transform that turns the high-range camera data into an 8-bit image that your display can show.With HDR photography, you capture even more color by taking different exposures of the same shot and combining them into a data file with a truly absurd amount of color resolution: up to 96 bits per pixel in some cases.But you still can't display that data. It has to be transformed into an 8-bit image so your screen can show it to you.What you've seen are 8-bit JPEGs created from high-range data files. And yes, most of the ones out there on the Internet are awful. But that doesn't mean high-range photography is bad. It means that people who don't know how to use it are bad.
i definitely agree with you guyssome of that stuff is awful, but HDR is relatively new in amateur photography, it is a big buzzword, and many people are interested to try it.i merely provided the link for people interested to see alot of HDR photos all in one spot. There are over 27,000 photos so saying they are all bad is not fair, but I did warn that they aren't all the best
I'm sick of HDR stuff, it frankly just looks like someone has got rather over excited with photoshop filters and produced a complete mess. Give me quality photography which looks real any day, as HDR is a lame gimmick which I won't be sorry to see the back of.
Chesterfield, thanks for posting. Most of the standard super-fantastic "HDR" shots on Flickr get annoying pretty quickly. The shots you've posted links to are absolutely gorgeous!Hopefully in a year or so, the fad will die down, and only people who are really trying to create art (or faithfully reproduce a scene) will continue to advance it.
WOW - everyone seems to be very negative on HDR... strange. I looked at Peter's example and was completely blown away. Turns out my old Canon D30 supports AEB and I just did a quick little test inside the house. No Ansel Adams material, but hell - this solves a LOT of problems for me where my chip was abandoning me in the past. I'll see it this way - it's either HDR or pay for a $10,000 camera. I've tried everything from polarized filters to tiny apertures on tripods - a lot of times I simply cannot capture the latitude I need on my digital cam. HDR, tastefully used could really help out.
I have been following this stream, of comments. I work with HDR all the time. One thing is that yes, there is a lot of bad HDRs out there, Just the same as there are a lot of bad photography out there, also. HDR in itself will not make a bad photograph look good. You have to start with taking good photos composition etc. And then, it is in the hands of the user to make HDR work for the image. The intent of HDR was to make a picture more like what the eye really sees. And that can be achieved, Or not achieved if the picture is mangled in post processing. If you have only seen what you consider flat or terrible images done in HDR, I invite you to my photo stream, were I think you will see what good use of HDR can do. Here is a set of my 10 most liked pictures, that have viewed thousands of times. 9 are HDRs and 1 is not. And If I did not tell you they were HDRs you would not know they were at all. <a class="user" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynchburgvirginia/sets/72157594155927866/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynchburgvirginia/sets/72157594155927866/</a>
Why you can't take 1 image and save multiple times:The imager senses photons and stores them as a charge. Every so many time slices, it reads what that charge is, and clears the charge out. So, you get a situation where if you let the sensor accumulate charge for longer, it will sense more light.the problem is that you don't know what the value in the sensor was at various intervals between the start and end. also, the sensor can only store so much charge, so when it "fills up" it's over (and that part is overexposed).so, if they designed an imager that could dump data out but not clear itself, that would work. however, there are probably problems with that.
You can effectively take 1 image and save multiple times, but not in-camera. If you take the image in RAW format, it saves the actual light data from the sensor as opposed to pixel data after compression to a JPEG. Using RAW software (can be done in Photoshop for most cameras via a plug-in) you can take the image and create 3 separate exposures from it. Then, you can take these 3 images, put them into Photomatix (or another HDR software, or even try Photoshop's HDR) and create your own HDR image. It takes alot of skill to make a beautiful HDR image as opposed to a so-so image. And don't forget, no matter what type of image you are trying to create, your original composition probably matters more than any post processing.
anonym41414Oct 29, 2006
"nearly every hdr image ive seen..."You've never seen any.This is a fundamental misunderstanding of high-dynamic-range photography. With normal JPEG photography, you capture no more color data than you can display. Your display is 8-bit, so the camera only captures 8-bit color.With raw photography, you capture more color than your can display. But in order to see your picture, you have to process it through a look-up table or other transform that turns the high-range camera data into an 8-bit image that your display can show.With HDR photography, you capture even more color by taking different exposures of the same shot and combining them into a data file with a truly absurd amount of color resolution: up to 96 bits per pixel in some cases.But you still can't display that data. It has to be transformed into an 8-bit image so your screen can show it to you.What you've seen are 8-bit JPEGs created from high-range data files. And yes, most of the ones out there on the Internet are awful. But that doesn't mean high-range photography is bad. It means that people who don't know how to use it are bad.
kevinwhiteOct 29, 2006
i definitely agree with you guyssome of that stuff is awful, but HDR is relatively new in amateur photography, it is a big buzzword, and many people are interested to try it.i merely provided the link for people interested to see alot of HDR photos all in one spot. There are over 27,000 photos so saying they are all bad is not fair, but I did warn that they aren't all the best
Closed AccountOct 29, 2006
"This stuff is the photo equivalent of bad "velvet-pastel-crying-clown" portraits"Dude that was the best description of HDR.
kotatsuOct 29, 2006
I'm sick of HDR stuff, it frankly just looks like someone has got rather over excited with photoshop filters and produced a complete mess. Give me quality photography which looks real any day, as HDR is a lame gimmick which I won't be sorry to see the back of.
mjpateyOct 30, 2006
Chesterfield, thanks for posting. Most of the standard super-fantastic "HDR" shots on Flickr get annoying pretty quickly. The shots you've posted links to are absolutely gorgeous!Hopefully in a year or so, the fad will die down, and only people who are really trying to create art (or faithfully reproduce a scene) will continue to advance it.
molecoolOct 30, 2006
WOW - everyone seems to be very negative on HDR... strange. I looked at Peter's example and was completely blown away. Turns out my old Canon D30 supports AEB and I just did a quick little test inside the house. No Ansel Adams material, but hell - this solves a LOT of problems for me where my chip was abandoning me in the past. I'll see it this way - it's either HDR or pay for a $10,000 camera. I've tried everything from polarized filters to tiny apertures on tripods - a lot of times I simply cannot capture the latitude I need on my digital cam. HDR, tastefully used could really help out.
mrynitOct 30, 2006
HDR + CS:S + my video card = 5fps
zack12349Nov 1, 2006
I have been following this stream, of comments. I work with HDR all the time. One thing is that yes, there is a lot of bad HDRs out there, Just the same as there are a lot of bad photography out there, also. HDR in itself will not make a bad photograph look good. You have to start with taking good photos composition etc. And then, it is in the hands of the user to make HDR work for the image. The intent of HDR was to make a picture more like what the eye really sees. And that can be achieved, Or not achieved if the picture is mangled in post processing. If you have only seen what you consider flat or terrible images done in HDR, I invite you to my photo stream, were I think you will see what good use of HDR can do. Here is a set of my 10 most liked pictures, that have viewed thousands of times. 9 are HDRs and 1 is not. And If I did not tell you they were HDRs you would not know they were at all. <a class="user" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynchburgvirginia/sets/72157594155927866/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynchburgvirginia/sets/72157594155927866/</a>
urbanpugMar 3, 2007
Why you can't take 1 image and save multiple times:The imager senses photons and stores them as a charge. Every so many time slices, it reads what that charge is, and clears the charge out. So, you get a situation where if you let the sensor accumulate charge for longer, it will sense more light.the problem is that you don't know what the value in the sensor was at various intervals between the start and end. also, the sensor can only store so much charge, so when it "fills up" it's over (and that part is overexposed).so, if they designed an imager that could dump data out but not clear itself, that would work. however, there are probably problems with that.
treetops18Mar 12, 2007
Awesome tutorial. I love your photos.
butch81385Mar 12, 2008
You can effectively take 1 image and save multiple times, but not in-camera. If you take the image in RAW format, it saves the actual light data from the sensor as opposed to pixel data after compression to a JPEG. Using RAW software (can be done in Photoshop for most cameras via a plug-in) you can take the image and create 3 separate exposures from it. Then, you can take these 3 images, put them into Photomatix (or another HDR software, or even try Photoshop's HDR) and create your own HDR image. It takes alot of skill to make a beautiful HDR image as opposed to a so-so image. And don't forget, no matter what type of image you are trying to create, your original composition probably matters more than any post processing.