Just know that HDR processing is a powerful tool and remember what Uncle Ben told Peter Parker aka Spiderman – What might cause someone to say “Mmmm” would cause the next consumer to say “UGH!” I won’t begin to tell you how much is too much when it comes to HDR processing, that is a personal choice and varies greatly in what it is you are trying to show with the image. How much is too much? Like seasonings in a dish, that is often a determination of the cook/photographer and the diner/image viewer. It’s quite easy to get carried away with HDR and have a resulting image that looks unnatural, grungy and back to that cooking analogy – Overcooked. But, take multiple shots, combine them with HDR, and you can get a final image with both inside and outside properly exposed. Expose for the bright scene outside and the interior will be too dark. If you only take one shot, properly exposed for the interior, the view out the windows will likely be overexposed. A good example – You are shooting an interior of a home with lots of windows. Then, typically using special HDR software tools, those images are combined with a technique called “Tone Mapping” so that the resulting final image “stretches” the tonal range. The typical technique when creating HDR images is to shoot multiple shots of the scene, some underexposed so that the dark portions of the scene are better seen, some exposed for what the camera meter says is “correct”, and some underexposed so that the highlights are preserved. What we really see is our mind's reconstruction of objects based on input provided by the eyes - not the actual light received by our eyes. The better question for this article, however, is why we use (and sometimes abuse) HDR techniques. You can explore the subject more in depth here. Our eyes scan the bright part of a scene, the dark parts, and construct the scene in the brain. So why do we think we can “see” better than our cameras? The answer is not in the optics of the eye or camera sensor, it’s because we humans have brains. Prints are much lower, about 6.5 stops and that is also about the contrast ratio the human eye can detect. Now, as far as Dynamic Range, modern digital cameras have an “original dynamic range” of from 10 to 12 stops. (32-bit color adds another 8-bit transparency channel.) All colors can be expressed by their RGB “recipe.” Here we see that pure yellow is 255, 255, 0 since yellow is a combination of red and green. With 24-bit color, 16,777,216 unique colors are possible. Pure Yellow, which is a mix of Red and Green would be 255, 255, 0. Any color can be expressed with this formula. Thus, when you see the term RGB, this stands for Red, Green, and Blue. Color is interpreted as a mix of the luminance values of each of the colors that a sensor can “see,” Red (R), Green (G), and Blue (B). In the digital world of photos, luminance is expressed in a range of 255 tones with 0 (Zero) being pure black and 255 being pure white. The Dynamic Range is the range of tones from total white to total black. It is a technique used to compensate for a problem cameras have – Low Dynamic Range. HDR is the acronym for High Dynamic Range. If your images look like any of these you are really overdoing it and this article is definitely for you! 1. I just wanted to take it to the extreme so you could easily see what I'm talking about. It's not that all of my images are great and that I don't make editing mistakes. I purposely had to “ugly up” some of my images to illustrate the “don't dos” I want to discuss here. Tastefully done, it can be a great technique.įirst, a little bit of a disclaimer if you want to call it that. Images that look like this is why HDR gets a bad name. Note how the image looks grainy and grungy. You start with uncooked ingredients, combine them and cook them to make something tasty, add just the right amount of seasoning and, if you are a good cook, serve up something that makes people say “Mmmmmm!” Do it wrong however, especially if you add too much of or the wrong seasoning and the sound you hear may be closer to UGH! Let’s talk about ten ways photographers too often improperly “cook and season” their images. – Aesop (c.620-560 BC) I always find it interesting that we refer to our unprocessed photos as RAW files and the parallels I’m able to draw between the processing and editing of photos and cooking. It is possible to have too much of a good thing.
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