Here’s a panorama of a valley off  Whiteside Mountain near Highlands, North Carolina.

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.

• A good candidate photo should be well exposed—that is there are not a lot of blacked out or burned out spots on the image. HDR images attempt to prevent this from happening by merging images together. Just about any image that is well exposed can be used, although you may be able to get away with a poorly exposed image.
  • If you look at the tone curve below, you see two peaks and a valley. If the tone curve contains peaks or valleys that are flat, then the image is probably blacked out or burned out.
  • Most cameras nowadays have a way to see the tone curve while you are shooting the image, or right after you’ve shot the image.
• If possible, shoot the photo in a RAW format so that the camera does not do any processing to the image.
• You’ll want a low ISO too.

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.

Pseudo HDR Original Image

Flat Tone Curve

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.

• If your image is flat already, you may not need to do any post processing.
• If the image has light and dark areas you may want do some post processing to flatten the image more.
• Add fill light if there are dark spots. You may want to decrease the overall contrast of the image and tweak the brightness some.
• If the image was shot at a high ISO, you’ll probably want to run a noise reduction algorithm to smooth this out some. Some HDR processes can really expose noise even at low ISOs.

Pseudo HDR Flattened Image

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!

Pseudo HDR Image

After I ran this image through Qtpfsgui (a free HDR workflow), I rotated and cropped it some to come up with this image.

Pseudo HDR Final Image

“Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool.”

-Isaiah 1:18b

I was playing around with tone-mapping on a single exposure from my camera…Here’s what I got.

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.

Charging the Line

Long Legs

Spinning

2 Pins Left

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!

Bad Scores, Or Bad Equipment?

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

Final Image

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.

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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”.

Waterfall Near Bryson City, NC

Here’s some more shots I did on the foggy December morning of the facade of St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans.

St. Louis Cathedral

St. Louis Cathedral

St. Louis Cathedral

St. Louis Cathedral