HDR comes into its own when there is simply too much dynamic range to capture with a standard camera. Sure, you can use a filter over the sky to capture tones you’d otherwise miss and that’s how it used to be done pre-digital.

Still, I would like to be able to compare an HDR picture to the best shot you can achieve without HDR. Not the individual pictures taken for the HDR but the shot you would take if for some reason you couldn’t do HDR (well, not you in particular, but the people who post HDR photographs in general trying to convince the world it’s the next best thing after peanut butter).

Larry Lamb :

Do you advise using a polarizing filter to get great skies in HDR? Will HDR produce rich sky tones without a polarizing filter?

I don’t use filters as HDR does the same job as some filters with multiple exposures. If you have a polarising filter, it may be useful with shots of water, but I think it’d be more trouble than its worth.

Thanks a lot for this tutorial… real nice and easy to understand HDR….

Let me try my hands on it now, and will post back the results ..

Oh, and the Munchy Box?
Terrifying.
And yet strangely delicious-looking, in a Homer Simpson way.

It only contains the tone compressor and not the details enhancer so cannot be used in this tutorial as none of the options in your guide are there.

As a beginner I’m not sure what the use of some of the tone compressor options are, but as it can’t be used in your tutorial I’ve gone with the Pro trial and have to live with the water marks for now

Excellent question. I’ve never tried the basic free version because I’m on a Mac and it’s Windows only. How about you get the demo and the basic version and do a quick comparison and post your results. I believe that the Pro version would teach you more, but not having tried both, it’s just a guess.

I’d love to see a comparison.

And yes, there’s no point in investing in a hobby until you know it’s for you.

Want to have a try myself but as a complete amateur (photography and the computer touch up side), would the basic version be enough to produce some starter stuff or do I need the free Pro demo and have to live with the watermarks for now?

Don’t mind paying up when I get better, but didn’t want to splash out when I’m still learning

Thanks

Oh, and while RAW is technically better, but every photo I’ve done recently is from best-quality JPEGs.

Good luck!

However, my camera, a Digital Rebel EOS XTi, has a (at least in my view) peculiar bracketing function. As far as I can tell, I can bracket Blue/Amber, or Green/Magenta, but, I see no way to bracket both. In addition, fairly extensive web searches on the subject have turned up nothing useful that might tell me (1) if bracketing in bot axes is even possible, and, if not, which axis ought I to bracket.

Cheers, Henry

Well, nothing, but it doesn’t gain you anything.

Think of the histograms. Let’s say normal processing is a 12-bit sensor saved as RAW format and converted to 16-bit (TIFF) for photoshopping around. This corresponds to a contrast-range in the source scene – sky 6 stops brighter than ground, for example. When you do HDR, you build a 32-bit image with greater range and greater detail – more information in shadows and highlights and smoother throughout. If you were to convert a pure HDR image straight to a JPEG, you’d simply think it looked very low-contrast.

If you take an 8-bit JPEG and apply a gamma curve to darken it 1 stop, all that happens is the lower part of the histogram (midtone and darker) get compressed and the higher part expands – so you lose detail. By doing that twice your 32-bit image has merely gained errors in tone-placement – you don’t gain image-data, merely the illusion of it which might look favourable if you’re lucky.

Tonemapping is where you use some algorithm to simulate apparent increased contrast locally within an image – mostly spatially (adjacent pixels) with some consideration for the pixel values. This is where you have the option to make it look whizzy but disgusting, or exercise some restraint and strive for normality

ObExample: hdr panorama.

Cameras: what you want to avoid is any pixel changing value unnecessarily between exposures – so you need a still scene or very long exposure for motion-blur – and fix the aperture and focus distance and vary the speed only. You can get somewhere with a simple point-’n'-shoot and exposure compensation; a dSLR would be better so you’re shooting RAW in the first place and have a nice lower-noise sensor. There’s nothing to stop you doing it with film if you want, as long as you can control the scans to represent the different exposures.

Software: free alternatives include FDRTools and qtpfsgui.

If in doubt, try it. You’ll see that you cannot create depth and detail where there is none.

I just don’t understand how that be classed as “cheating” at HDR, as the whole point of shooting in RAW is that you can change EV value and WB later.

thanks for that! just tried it, it worked a treat! watermark free images. excellent.

No idea what he was on about. I think he was just a drive-by troll.

Anyone know what John Smith’s Bitter was on about, or is he just a random loon?

“@All those faking it with one image, what’s wrong with just converting the JPEG into a 16-bit TIFF in Potatoshop?”

Nothing I guess, don’t know enough to be able to tell you otherwise, as you said there is no correct way. I’ll have to give it a try though so cheers for that.

That’s a great article, and smashing photos.

@John Smith’s Bitter
Um, wtf? I’d love to know what the ‘correct way’ of doing this is. Let’s face it, you’re not going to get this in the lens without special filters and managed lighting. If you’re doing it off the camera, the moment you take it off the memory card, all bets are off; from that moment on, there is no ‘correct way’. If you have any tutorials that show us how to do this the correct way (remembering this is for beginners) then I’d love to be enlightened.

@All those faking it with one image, what’s wrong with just converting the JPEG into a 16-bit TIFF in Potatoshop?

Demystifying is cool.

Some bright sparks have rewritten the firmware to access a bunch of hidden features, including raw shooting and bracketing! Let joy be unconfined. There’s more info and the download at:
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK_in_Brief

For instance, this was a single JPEG:

Photomatix doesn’t need Photoshop to do this. What you can do is run the demo of Photomatix on its own and then open the result in The Gimp.

ps. The Gimp sucks. No, really, it does. It’s a worthy and valiant attempt, but … yeah, it sucks. Friends don’t let friends use sucky software.

is there a plugin or tool for the gimp? Photoshop is great peace of software, put much to expensive for me.

//Arne

By the way, your blog concerning munchy boxes caused me to soil my underwear and I will be seeking compensation.