HDR Photography

September 8, 2013

HDR (high dynamic range) photography has recently become wildly popular. As with most things that seem like fads, I have been ignoring it, but now it is becoming clear that it is here to stay, and that it has real merit.

One thing that really got me interested, was a series of photographs of the High Sierra (which is a place I love to visit and to photograph) by a fellow named Bruce Lemons:

I felt that these really captured the beauty of the area, and that he had done a really fine job putting this group of photos together, so I started to rethink some things. Also, these photos were taken with a Canon PowerShot SD1300 IS camera (12 megapixels, 28mm lens w/ 4x zoom) selling for $185 in September, 2013. Thought provoking. The key point in the above essay is that non-photographers absolutely love HDR, while many photographers have grown tired of it and/or find it gimmicky. You also may note that I continually link to and reference Scott Kelby. This is because there is an absolute deluge of photography information on the internet, and I am picking Scott as my favored and trusted source. I also know that he annoys some people (the same folks who wear starched and pressed underwear) with his sense of humor (which I get a big kick out of), and I am eager and glad to drag those folks into reading more of what he has to say.

How does one do it?

The usual game with HDR is to take a bracketed set of exposures (usually 3), then pass the three image captures to some HDR software which assembles the different images. There are many options to choose from when it comes to HDR software.

What software do I use?

As always in the world of photography, it comes down to "how much money do you have?". Seriously though, there are choices to make. In particular there are many ways to do HDR (styles if you will), and you should decide if you want to make realistic or stylized HDR images. Also it is worth looking carefully to find out what kind of raw image file support is offered and just how you feed images to whatever package you are considering.

Photoshop CS5 is said to have an HDR "feature", and since I already "own" this software and have it installed on my computer, this would seem to be a logical place to start. If you didn't already own a copy of CS5 (and of course in the world of software you don't really "own" anything) this would be a very expensive route to take.

Photomatix Pro is said to be a good choice, is supposed to run fast. Scott Kelby likes the "painterly" option. Cost is $99. Mr. Kelby mentions it in this video.

The following page (which I like a lot) by Trey Ratcliff describes how he does HDR and has a lot of good information. He uses Photomatix Pro. He says that Photomatix Pro will make very nice HDR images from a single raw file, but what he usually does it to shoot a 3 exposure set at -2, 0, +2.

HDR Efex Pro, from "Nix Software, by Google, $149. The high price, the fact they can't spell "effects" and the "by Google" all make me nervous. Scott Kelby calls it his favorite, or did at one time.

Take this list with a grain of salt, but this is a nice overview, be sure and click on the images and view them full size before drawing any conclusions.

There is decent free HDR software available: This is an open source software package, and could be built to run on Linux.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org