A Little HDR Tutorial

HDR (or sometimes HDRi) stands for High Dynamic Range image. So what the heck is it and how do you do it?

Let's start with the a photo I took one day at a Civil War battlefield site. This was taken with a general middle ground setting on the camera. It averages out the bright of the sky so you get some clouds and a little of the porch. It's okay but due to the harsh light and the shadows you lose a little detail.

Next take a look at this photo. Here it was taken a stop down so the clouds have more definition. But overall the photo is too dark and you lose almost all detail of the porch.

Then this next photo is taken one stop up. Now you can see the details of the porch better but the sky is whitewashed.

I could play around with the three photos and come up with something decent, but in this case my best method would be to combine all three photos using the best parts of each one.

 How to do it? It is best if you shoot using a tripod but I hardly ever do. I just try to hold the old camera as steady as I can and snap away. My camera can be set to automatically bracket three shots and it's my preferred method of shooting.

Next you have to have the software to combine the shots. You can search the web and find software although the best is probably Photomatix. I use the software that came with my Corel Photo Pro x2. There are plenty of good free trial versions available but they will generally leave a watermark on the finished project.

Load the three photos with your software. You usually have to align the images, some software will do it automatically. Then generate the image. What comes out is generally a flat look photo that needs a little bit of help. 

But once you tone map it and do some post process work (in this case I did a clarity adjustment, added some color saturation and a little sharpening.) Now the photo has the full detail of the clouds and the porch and looks much better than any of the three originals.

I only use this process on about 10% of my photos and I try not to go too overboard with the adjustments. Some critics really hate HDR but I see it's place in the digital world.