High Dynamic Range Imagery and your Photography (Part 2) - Temecula, CA

Well in part 1, we defined what a HDR is along with AEB and EV. You have to love these acronyms. If you don’t what these acronyms mean read part 1 of this article.

For taking AEB images for HDR processing I strongly recommend a good tripod. Understand any movement during the AEB process will severely affect your final result. I normally use a 2 second delay to make sure there is no movement on my part. You see, part of the processing of a HDR image in the HDR creation software is the alignment process. If there was too much movement in your shoot it won’t be able to align the images correctly resulting in a misaligned image and unusable. Now again be careful when shooting AEB images in an area that has a lot of movement as your photo will not align correctly. The faster your camera can do continuous shots the better.

So now you have all these photos in threes. Yes they will look strange as one is too dark, one way too light and one is okay. Well that’s what you need to create an HDR image. Now we’re going to discuss how to process these type images, pitfalls and results.



Let’s take these three AEB images and make it a HDR. Several software programs are available out there that can accomplish this task. There are also a couple of free programs available. But beware they will only process a HDR image. Well I can hear you say, “Well that’s what I want to do”, am I right? Simply, try to open a raw HDR image . . . .not! You see your HDR image must be converted. So if you see a free HDR generator software make sure it will tone map and be able to save it as a 8bit jpeg. Adobe CS4 has HDR generating capabilities but it is somewhat cumbersome to use and I don’t care for the result. Personally, I use “Photomatrix” this is an outstanding HDR generation software. User friendly with many tone mapping options where you can make it have minor or major changes. It also has a batch process which is great for processing many pictures in groups of three. I normally come back with 300 pictures and process these AEB images in the batch process and auto set the tone mapping process. The batch process will save you a lot of time when doing many AEB images at once. Tone mapping is required in the conversion process and a simple “save image as” gets you to your end result. But you are not done yet, maybe you are but if you are like me into Photoshop it goes for the removal of any unwanted items within the final image. Also I will run it through “levels” one more time to give it the final desired look I’m looking for.



One more note of caution these files are very large and depending what you are doing with them you must keep that in mind. If you are using them in a web page you will want to reduce the image size and dpi to 72. If you don’t do that the image will take forever to load on your page. However, if you are making prints they are okay as is and just size them to the printed format size you are printing too. Don’t reduce the dpi in this case.



HDR imagery will give you a competitive edge against your competitors and you can charge more for HDR than for normal pictures. I can guarantee you this; your customers will want HDR images and purchase HDR prints over standard prints.