HDR Photography - Examples and tutorials
HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range”, and is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques.
HDR was originally developed for use with purely computer-generated images. Later, methods were developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures. HDR is now popularly used to refer to the process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range.
“Tone mapping is a technique used in image processing and computer graphics to map a set of colours to another; often to approximate the appearance of high dynamic range images in media with a more limited dynamic range.”
More info about HDR imaging at Wikipedia.
Examples
HDR images can be quite stunning as you can see by the examples below.
- 35 fantastic HRD images showcased by Smashing Magazine.
- 20 beautiful HRD images showcased by Abduzeedo.com
- HDR Creme has a great HDR images gallery where users can view, share and rate.
- Flikr.com “best of HDR photos” pool.
Tutorials
Adobe Photoshop CS2 & CS3 include the “merge to HDR” feature, that allows the photographer to combine a series of bracketed exposures into a single image which encompasses the tonal detail of the entire series.
- Cambridgeincolour.com has written a detailed example on how to create HDR images from your photos, and can be viewed here.
- Revver.com has a nice video tutorial on how to create HDR images with Photoshop CS3.
- HDR tutorial roundup put together by Tutorialblog.org
- How to create ‘High Dynamic Range’ images using Photomatix by Vanilla Days.
- Click here for a long list of HDR videos from Youtube.com
HDR Software
Photomatix
Increase the dynamic range of your photographs with this stand-alone program.
Tags: hdr, high dynamic range, learning, Photography, resources, techniques, tutorials
