Light and Shadow: Adventures in High Dynamic Range Photography
I’d hoped to get out to World’s End yesterday, but didn’t have time. Instead I grabbed my camera and headed out on a walk around the South End, with the goal of taking some auto-bracketed pictures that I could use for my first experiments with high dynamic range (HDR) photography.
I’d read about Photomatix, a program for creating HDR photos, almost a year ago and have been meaning to try it out ever since. Made by HDRSoft, the software costs $99, but you can download a fully functional trial version (the only difference is that the trial version leaves a Photomatix watermark on your finished images.)
HDR photos look weird—that’s the first thing that needs to be acknowledged. They don’t look the way we expect photos to look. They look more like the way our eyes (which are sensitive to a far greater range of luminosities than any camera) really see the world. You know how it’s really hard to take pictures with visible detail in both the highlights and the shadows? HDR image processing software can create such images, by blending a minimum of three photos that you capture using different exposures.
There’s plenty of information on the Web about how to make HDR images, so I won’t go into it here—I liked this beginner’s tutorial from the blog 23x by Jared Earle. I just thought I’d post some of my early HDR experiments—see the shots below (and click to see larger versions). The photos below may not look so odd, but if you could compare them to the originals you’d see how much more detail they have. In fact, I’m definitely agreeing so far with what Earle writes: “When you look back at your earlier HDR attempts, you may well cringe at how overdone they look.” But it’s fun stuff, and I hope to get a better hang of the technique on some future weekend. I haven’t decided yet whether to drop $99 on the full version of Photomatix.
[Update 10/31/09: I did end up buying a full license for Photomatix, and I've created and posted a whole bunch of new HDR photos.]
Flowers in the yard of a Newton Street brownstone
Berries on a shrub
Haven Street
A former church in the South End with the Prudential Center in the background
Hey Daniel, thanks for your comment. I’ve gotten the full version of Photomatix and I’m continuing to play around with it, using some photos from a recent New England leaf-peeping trip — see my post today at http://www.travelswithrhody.net/wordpress/2009/10/15/new-england-the-hdr-edition/.
Let us know if you decide to go with the full version. I actually just started playing with HDR a few weeks back myself, but have been trying a different route with Photoshop (original CS, not the new “Merge to HDR” in CS4). So far the results have only come out so-so. I still have a lot to learn with regard to the photo histogram manipulations. Like you point out here, it’s easy to overdo it.