HDR Crash Course

By now, if you haven’t yet heard of HDR, or High Dynamic Resolution, you probably have at least run across images that seem like they couldn’t have been taken with a normal camera. It’s a process that has opened up huge artistic possibilities in the realm of digital photography and really has me excited.

So is it complicated? Nah, it’s just a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to more accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight.

Okay, so maybe you didn’t want to know that, did you? Seeing the result is much more fun than trying to understand how it works. Below is a very short, compact visual of the process of creating an HDR shot of my office space today.

Start with multiple images shot on a tripod at varying exposures (+ –2EV, to be exact):

The images are then processed together in a program called Photomatix:

The initial image is then tone mapped:

35 steps and we’re almost there! Actually, we can skip those. Here is the final result:

Some detail areas:

If you would like to see more cool HDR images (mostly HDR, anyway) go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulnielsenphotography