# High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photos



## MikeScone (Feb 26, 2011)

We had a snowstorm yesterday, and when I woke up this morning the sun was shining brightly and everything was covered by a fresh coat of snow. I grabbed the camera, and took this shot out my bedroom window:







One of the problems with taking this sort of picture is that the "dynamic range" - the range of light levels in the picture from the glaring white of the snow on the pine tree through the black of the tree trunks - is much wider than the camera's image sensor can handle. If you expose for the snow, then you lose all of the shadow detail. Expose for the shadows, and all the snow gets blown out to featureless white. So, the camera has to pick a compromise exposure, which gets most of the levels right - but the brightest snow on the tree is all white and the shadows are inky black. 

With film, that was all you could do. However, digital photography gives us another option - by shooting a number of pictures at a range of exposures, and then combining them in the processing software, you can get an image with a much larger dynamic range. The techy term for that is "HDR", for "High Dynamic Range". 

This sort of image is perfect for that kind of manipulation. So, I tried taking five pictures at one f-stop intervals - two stops underexposed, one stop under, "normal" exposure, one stop overexposed and two stops over - and then used Photoshop's "Merge to HDR" function to merge them all into one HDR. There are lots of different adjustments and presets in the function - my favorites were the basic HDR, "Saturated", "Surrealistic Artistic" and "Monochrome". 

This is the basic HDR image: 





Saturated (emphasizes color):





Surrealistic Artistic (high contrast and exaggerated color):





Monochrome:





It's not something I'd do every day or to every image, but HDR can give you some interesting results.


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## missyscove (Feb 27, 2011)

Beautiful pictures, Mike! I really need to get around to getting photoshop. The trouble is I can't decide if I want just photoshop or one of the packages (all at student prices, of course)
The snow was beautiful today! We went to the Corning museum of glass for my roommate's birthday and I had to focus on driving and not on how much I wanted to take pictures of everything we were driving past (almost as bad as how easily I get distracted by hawks while I'm driving)


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## Randi (Feb 27, 2011)

I would LOVE to play around with HDR but I just have PSE9 which doesn't have HDR capabilities. I'm sure there are plenty of photo merge applications on the web but none with the ease CS5 or something around there would offer! I'm a student so maybe I should look in to getting CS5.


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## MikeScone (Feb 27, 2011)

*Randi wrote: 

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> I just have PSE9 which doesn't have HDR capabilities


It does, in a way, but it's called "Photomerge Exposure". That doesn't give you quite the control that full PhotoShop "Merge to HDR" has, but it's a good first step. Use the "Smart Blending" sliders to adjust the effects. You can play with the other controls once you've done that, and get the same results (or very close, anyway).
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> I'm a student so maybe I should look in to getting CS5.


It's well worth it, if you're serious about digital imaging - I don't know what Adobe's pricing is these days, but at one point the student price for PhotoShop was only $50 or so more than the usual price for Elements.


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## Randi (Feb 27, 2011)

Hmm... I will have to look in to Photomerge Exposure and see if I can figure that out! 

It looks like CS5 is $190.00 for the student edition and LR3 is $79.99. I just retouch here and there, no heavy editing (I'm not a pro just a hobbyist... mostly just animal photos), so maybe LR3 would be enough for me.


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## Boz (Feb 27, 2011)

I've been recently playing around with HDR myself! It's something new I learned about. It's so fun! I can't wait to play with it more this summer.

I got the CS5 package. The web design one. (student prices of course!)

I am learning about all the programs and now that I know most of them I really like them!


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