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General Photography Technology

Waveland and Kenmore in HDR


HDR or High Dynamic Range is a photography post production technique that seems to be very trendy these days. It’s known for yielding striking images full of color and detail not attainable through a single shot. I’ve been fascinated by the idea since I first heard about it a few years ago.

Basically, for those of you who are not photographers the idea is pretty simple. A digital image can only contain a certain amount of light / color information so tones above and below the acceptable range get clipped out, either appearing as pure black or pure white. What HDR seeks to do is to bring back that information by working with multiple exposures.

In short: you take three shots, one too dark, one too light and one even. Each one of those images will have information the others won’t. For example, one image might highlight the color in the sky and another might bring out the details in the shadows. By combining these three shots we can create one composite image with more color and detail than any of the originals.

For my first attempt I worked with a combination of tools from shot to upload. The first of which is my Canon Digital Rebel XTi and my trusty Canon 28mm f2.8 lens. I’m a big fan of this lens for it’s wide angle and relatively high aperture (the f2.8). The allows my camera to take in a lot of light very quickly with a lot of sharpness and crisp color. This is absolutely one of my favorite lenses.  Every Canon shooter should have something similar.

From there I loaded my images into Apple’s Aperture 2.1 software where I picked my three shots and did some conservative adjustments to bring out more detail in the images. From there I went into Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Now anyone who knows my photography most likely knows that I do everything I can to avoid working in Photoshop. These days I try to accomplish everything I possibly can inside Aperture. However I have not been impressed by what I’ve seen from the Hydra HDR plugin that is available for Aperture, so I decided to give Photoshop’s built in one a chance.

Much to my delight the feature worked as advertised. By loading in the three images it was able to create one 32-bit image with a startling range of color. Unfortunately not many programs can handle a 32-bit file so I had to convert it back down to the 16-bit range of the previous files. However, the ultimate goal was still accomplished. My one 16-bit file now contained a lot more color and detail than any of the three. Still the image started to look a little flat so, from there I did some basic curves adjustments to restore some contrast and moved the image back to Aperture.

Inside Aperture I did a little more tweaking of saturation and sharpness to make the image punch some more and there we have it, my first real HDR image is a success. (At least I think so.)

The biggest challenge in this process to me was shooting the photographs themselves. I had to make sure that, without a tripod, I kept my shots steady and without interruption from cars or passers by.

As a whole I’m pleased by the process and the results. I will definitely play with HDR imaging a lot more in the future.

4 replies on “Waveland and Kenmore in HDR”

I like the concept of this shot and there is lot of positives here. But to be honest, I would like to see a little more detail in the foreground. There is too much lost in the shadows, in my opinion. Originally being from Illinois, I especially like the subject. :) I think you would get a much more appealing results at a different time of day when there is more light available.

Keep us posted on future HDR work. I’m starting to play around with it a bit myself. I think the process is pretty cool. Have you played with Photomatix? I’ve heard good things about it.

Lee: Thanks for the feedback! I think you’re right about the shadows but i had trouble keeping it rich and heavy on contrast when I let it go lighter. I hate HDR images you see where there is almost no shadow because of so much light and the mid-tones start to flatten. I also tend to shoot a little dark. I’ll play with it and see what I can do. Also i’ll keep that in mind for the future.

Jeff: I haven’t played with Photomatix yet, though I’ve heard great things.

Thanks for checking out my blog!

I’m pretty sure I’ve already let you know how much I love this, but it still stands. =]

And as far as Photomatix goes, I’ve played around with the trial version and love it. As soon as I can justify buying it, it’s mine!

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