Surreal, But Awesome! The HDR Way

Think of what you can do with your amazing digital SLR camera or even a point and shoot camera. Don't just settle taking plain pictures out of what you have. With great technical skills and even greater creative sensibility, you can transform a plain picture into an art form.

With High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photography, you can create pictures with greater detail in shadows, sunlight, and subject. This allows you to explore your image's tonal detail through wider sets of exposures. HDR Photography incorporates advanced set of photography techniques to open up new lighting and tonal possibilities. You can experiment on what digital photography can do to capture the intensity levels found in natural settings, or you can create impressive pictures rich in emotion and detail.

To achieve better quality High Dynamic Range photographs, use this technique with scenes that have simple lighting geometries like landscapes. This way you cannot easily blend the light and dark areas of the image through a graduated neutral density (GND) filter. The reason behind is, GND filters covers the dynamic range while still preserving local contrast of the image.

Now, let's take some pictures. With your digital SLR camera or a point and shoot camera, you can capture a series of identically-positioned photos in varied exposures. Your camera must allow you to set these exposures manually. You also need a sturdy tripod because it supports your camera, and you need to get a clear-cut image since you are experimenting on different lighting values. Motionless images are your best subjects when taking HDR photographs, since your taking identical shots. The last stage to achieve that "wow" in your image is to control its colors, contrast, saturation and brightness and darkness, among others. Processing your image's brightness and darkness is the digital manipulation of its exposures. You need software for these technical aspects of HDR Photography. You can either use Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix.

Photoshop CS2 has a "merge to HDR" feature that allows you to combine the series of exposures into a single 32-bit HDR image file. You can also convert this 32-bit image into a 16 or 8-bit LDR file using tonal mapping. Photoshop CS2 has a HDR Conversion tool that you can choose one from among four options. These are (1) Exposure and Gamma, (2) Highlight Compression, (3) Equalize Histogram, and (4) Local Adaptation. On the other side, Photomatix also reveals and shadow details through tonal mapping, and blends your pictures in different exposures, just like Photoshop CS2.

Whatever photo editing software you use will depend on which software you are comfortable using. Moreover, you need to tap a lot of your creativity and to experiment with HDR conversions to create realistic, surreal or emotive pictures, depending on your purpose. Use care when using these HDR tools, as overdoing editing during conversion can easily damage your image's sense of realism. Lastly, for best results, HDR should only be used if your subject already has good lighting.

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