Whiteside Mountain near Highlands, North Carolina
- March 9th, 2010
- By admin
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Pseudo high dynamic range photos are really nothing more than a single exposure processed as an HDR. There are other guides on how to do this but I am going to describe the process I’ve found that I think works pretty well, at least in my humble opinion. This little guide assumes nothing about software, but points out principles I think may help enhance your pseudo HDR experience.
The first thing you’ll want to do is select or take a good candidate photo for processing.
I shot this image at as a RAW file at ISO 100. This is the image with no processing save a resize and conversion to a JPEG, but even conversion to a JPEG does alter it some.
The next step you’ll want to do is to “flatten” the image. An image that is flat is an image that seems to lack contrast such that the colors look washed out. The human eye has a tendency to gravitate towards localized contrast, and images that don’t have such are typically described as flat. RAW images right off a camera almost always look flat without some sort of post processing. Images converted to JPEG usually go through some sort of algorithm to make the image look more natural, typically done by adding more contrast. The white line represents the bias by which the photo processing software is altering the photo. This line is straight (i.e. flat) while the human eye sees things in more of an “S” shape with the line flattening out at the top and bottom.
Once the image is flat, you’ll want to save it as a 16 bit TIFF or something that supports a higher bit range than 8 bit because tone mapping attempts to compress higher dynamic range images into lower range images, typically by reducing the color information. 16 bit TIFF files store enough information for most modern cameras.
After saving the image, you can process it like any other image that was produced using HDR, so fire up you’re HDR program and start tweaking the image with tone mapping!
After I ran this image through Qtpfsgui (a free HDR workflow), I rotated and cropped it some to come up with this image.
I felt like I was in Jr. High again…a friend of mine turned 25 and wanted to go bowling on his birthday, so we did. It was great fun.
The scores here look terrible…I bowled a strike and 5 spares in one game, and it reported a a score of something like 60. After it quit scoring, I just bowled for fun…I did learn how to throw a hook…that was a lot of fun!
It’s Photo Friday at photofriday.com. This week’s theme is “Self Protrait”. Here’s a shot of April and I…I took it holding the camera at arms length while we kissed.
Here are some more waterfalls I processed using Qtpfsgui.
Graveyard Falls, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina
Hickory Nut Falls, Chimney Rock, North Carolina
There is something about shooting waterfalls that is a lot of fun…Maybe it is because I like to hike around in the woods, and the waterfalls themselves are the endpoint, or maybe it is just the pure beauty of the falls themselves. Whatever it is, I do enjoy it. There are plenty of guides on how to do shoot waterfalls and HDR, so I felt I’d combine two and add my two cents to the collection of wisdom.
First, a little jargon: A High Dynamic Rance image contains more information than image sensors are capable of collecting. The dynamic range of a sensor refers to the range of light intensity a sensor can detect. For any given sensor, any light brighter than the range the sensor can detect is interpreted as white, and anything darker as black. You may have noticed that when taking pictures indoors during the day, windows appear to be white in a picture, but with your eye you can distinguish objects outside and inside. This is because the dynamic range of the human eye is greater than that of a camera. An HDR image is a combination of multiple images taken at different shutter speeds that are then combined to create an image with more dynamic range than the sensor can detect in any single image. HDR softeware combines the well exposed elements of each photo while removing the overexposed and underexposed elements. After the HDR is created, software then attempts to tone map the image–that is compress the HDR image into a form that is usable for print or on-screen display, as both print media and screens like sensors can only display a limited dynamic range less than what the human eye can see.
Waterfalls offer a particularly great opportunity for using HDR, as it is often times difficult to properly expose waterfalls such that the water is not “burned out” or “blown out” (that is completely white) and the content around the water fall is not utterly black or so dark one cannot see it anyways. HDR’s offer a great solution to this as you can expose the white water and the surrounding content and combine these elements for some beautiful landscape photography. So with no further adieu, we’ll begin.
Okay, so it’s not Friday, but wanted to start posting a weekly photo per the theme at photofriday.com. This week’s theme is “Nature”.