So what is HDR photography all about? In short, HDR techniques allow you to take pictures of high-contrast scenes and preserve all that important shadow and highlight detail. But it comes with a lot of jargon. Here we answer all the common questions about HDR images.
This luminosity mask technique enables you to create the perfect raw HDR image by blending two exposures according to lightness, not just area. This is a variation on the traditional HDR photography technique, but because we want to darken highlights and lighten shadows throughout the image rather than in selected areas, we’ll blend the images in a different way.
Some photographers employ the processing powers of packages like Photoshop CS5 or Photomatix to bracketing exposures to combine into a single composite high dyanmic range image that reveals fine detail in the shadows, midtones and highlights. HDR photography editing techniques add rich (and sometimes false) colours that enhance the artistic look of a shot, and many even like the way the HDR process can add artefacts such as halos around object edges.
Capturing a scene with a full range of tones is one of the biggest challenges faced by everyone from amateur to professional photographers. Our tutorial on HDR photography shows you subtle ways around this common photography problem by learning how to set up, shoot and process a high dynamic range image. Even if it isn’t your first time practicing HDR photography, we’re confident you’ll learn something new.
Whatever subject you shoot, capturing detail is fundamental. And bracketing your exposures is one of the best and easiest ways to ensure you can produce images with a high dynamic range and bags of detail. A staple on lists of photography tips all over the internet, getting in the routine of bracketing photos will put you in good position for making images of the highest quality.
In this post we’ve answered some of the most common questions about bracketing, as well as explained step-by-step how to bracket exposures and explained the principles of dynamic range and exposure blending.
Follow our simple steps below and learn how to stitch two photos together to create a vertorama image, or vertical panorama, which gives you the best possible image quality in your landscape photos.
In a new series of weekend guest blogs on Digital Camera World, professional travel and landscape photographer David Clapp will be sharing the stories behind how he made some of his favourite images. Sometimes it will be how he processed a photo; other times it will be how he simply got to his location in one piece! In his first post, the Getty contributor tells us how a challenging sunny, yet foggy, morning in Devon made getting a good exposure a real challenge.
If you’ve ever taken a shot in sunlight, or any other situation where the brightness range is high, the chances are your camera will have lost some detail in the darkest parts of the picture, the brightest parts or both. The problem isn’t to do with exposure. It’s because the difference between the brightest and darkest areas, or ‘dynamic range’, is so great that you can’t find a single exposure that can capture them both.
Here we explain how to check if you’re capturing all the tones in a scene, typical problem areas and simple ways you can boost your dynamic range.
When you’re faced with a subject that has a high dynamic range – that is, one that has high contrast, with both very bright highlights and very dark shadows – one technique you can use to capture the full tonal range is high dynamic range imaging. But as you will see in our Photoshop tutorial below, there is a simple way to get an HDR effect from just one picture.
High dynamic range (HDR) is something photographers either love or hate. We love it! You can use it to create some extremely dynamic, surreal images and push the look to its limits. There are many bad examples of HDR out there where extreme tone mapping in Photomatix has left images overcooked and overdone. But when you aim for realistic HDR and your images aren’t pushed to extremes, it’s a technique that can really help you in difficult lighting conditions.
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