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HDR Photography

From Mike Beane's Blog

This is a test jump into HDR photography. Hopefully it develops as I learn more, but it was so interesting I just took a leap at it.

Faux HDR

  • First off, I cheated at this. I took 1 picture (which wasn't really a great picture to begin with) and manually manipulated the colors to over & under expose. For the first test I wanted to see the merge results.
Underexposed
Original
Overexposed


  • The results were rich in color. I shifted between 2 exposure spaces and the latter of the two was the richest.
  • Having seen the combined difference, I'll work on learning on the Powershot S3 how to manipulate the over/under exposure and see what a true light picture results with.
Combined - 2 Stops
Combined - 4 Stops

Real Test 1: Flower Pot

  • Flower pot on Porch. I took this a few hours after the faux test. Much better
  • Pictures one and two are cropped sections of the flower pot. Note the detail in the HDR version.
  • Picture three is the full HDR picture
  • Picture four is a combination of all of the exposures (marked) and a grayscale strip to show the differences.
Original - Cropped
HDR Cropped
HDR Full
Exposure Ranges


Real Test 2: Tower

  • 21 pictures ranging in exposures
  • Noted that there is a need to drop overly exposed pictures (95% white) from the batch
Original
HDR


Test 3: Dining Room Light

Light2Test HDR.jpg

Real Test 3: River

  • 17 pictures ranging in exposures
File:Hdrtest-river-original.jpg
HDR


Programs

  • HDR Shop - V1 is free for non-commercial
  • Photomatix - The older version is free (no tone tools)
    • Apparently no alignment options
  • Photoshop C2 or higher
  • qtpfsgui
  • Artizen - Save to .hdr for use with other programs (no branding)

References