Foto Friday: High Dynamic Range Editing (HDR)

Last week Leah left a comment on the bracketing post about HDR (High Dynamic Rang Editing). She had told me about HDR a while back and I had completely forgotten about it. This forgetting thing is nothing new.

Speaking of that…where are my pants?

(Side note: You all read Leah right? She is the first blog I ever read that was not a family or friend. I now consider her to be a good friend of mine. She even campaigned for me to get to last year’s BlogHer (Too bad I did not win. Boo!). I love her so much so that I am planning on extending my BlogHer ’08 trip so I can go and sit on her and Simon’s deck, whilst drinking honey martinis. She is smart. She is funny (So is Simon!). She takes great photos. YOU SHOULD READ HER.)

Onward!

HDR is a really cool thing that you can do with those bracketed photos that you take. For those who do not care to read the long-winded wikipedia definition, I will break it down all simple-like.

Sometimes you will take photos that are “high contrast”. When you take said photos, they do not turn out the way that you see them in real life. This is because the lighting is all over the place and the camera is NOT AS DYNAMIC AS YOU.

It’s true! Whether you believe it or not.

But there is a solution!

Since I have so much free time on my hands (ha!), I thought I would try out HDR. If only to show you guys what HDR means.

This week the weather has been…dreary for the most part. Grey and overcast and not so contrast-y. Either that, or we had ultra clear blue skies (and bitterly cold!) and also not so big on the contrast. I was disappointed that I did not have a sweet outside shot to show you guys how the whole HDR thing worked.

Honey took the kids with him to run errands on Wednesday so I could get some work done and I asked him to pick me up some flowers. Yes, I asked. But yes, he delivered.

HDR works as follows.

You take three photos using the bracketing technique I told you about last week. You will need a tripod. The tripod is your friend.

(That’s what she said.)

The first photo is middle-metered.

The second photo is under-exposed.

The third photo is over-exposed.

If you use the software provided by Photomatix, you can turn three good photos into one dynamic photo. Check out the examples on their site. Wow.

Here is what the software generated based on the above three photos:

The free trial is indefinite, but places their watermark on the photo.

This result was…OK. But not as dynamic as I wanted.

Then I looked to the southwest. Behold! Contrast!

This is the setting sun, surrounded by clouds. Honey asked me if I took them in black and white, but no! This was taken in colour! It’s November, folks.

Middle metered:

Underexposed:

Overexposed:

The final product, via HDR:

Isn’t that COOL?

Taken in my own backyard. The sticks rock.

There is even a Flickr pool devoted to HDR photography (link courtesy of the great Leah). The photos in there are mind-blowing.

This technique obviously does not apply to kids. Unless they are sleeping. Except for my kids, who do back flips in their sleep.

But if you want to be creative? HOW COOL IS HDR?

Hope at least one of you liked that. Hope the lot of you who come here daily like Leah. She’s super.

Hope at least twenty or so of you give me some feedback. Feedback gives me inspiration for my next week’s post.

Happy Friday!