Richard Rathe's Reflections

Another experiment. Handheld exposures at +2  0 -2 using an inexpensive 0.45x wide angle attachment. Here is the 0 EV RAW image, the best I could do importing into PS…

The camera did a good job with the exposure to get shadow details, but the sky is blown. Here is the tone compression image, which approximates what I get with Lightroom, but better for having the dynamic range of three exposures…

And finally the detail enhancer, plus some post-processing in PS to increase the global contrast and color saturation…

This last image begins to approximate the “HDR Look” I think. Pushed it just to the edge of natural in this case. Notice the obvious detail on the porch, which was in deep shadow!

I’m learning about High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography using a Canon G10 and Photomatix Pro. The photo above is my first attempt using the Detail Enhancer tool with five bracketed exposures +4 +2  0 -2 -4. Here is the same image again, this time with the Tone Compressor tool…

Here is a comparison photo created from a single RAW file with minimal adjustment…

One thing I discovered is that the Tone Compressor in Photomatix, Adobe Lightroom, and the RAW plug-in for Photoshop all do approximately the same thing—global tone mapping to recover “blown” pixels in bright areas and bring out detail in dark shadows.

The key toning controls from Lightroom 1.4.1 are shown on the right. Recovery pulls the highlights in from the right on the histogram. Fill Light does the opposite from the left. It also has the nifty Clarity and Vibrance sliders near the bottom. The former is a type of local contrast enhancer and the latter increases the saturation of mid tones. I routinely give my photos a dash of each! The RAW plug-in has almost identical controls for importing/converting. Turns out I’ve be doing lightweight HDR for the past two years thanks to LR. Now it’s time to take things to the next level!

Finally, I just finished reading Ferrell McCollough’s Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Digital Photography, which is a good place to start if you are ready for an in depth discussion of techniques and software.