Single-Serving Photo

There is an in-depth Photoshop tutorial in this article, so make sure to read the whole thing!

There has been a good deal of activity and interest lately in the area of “high dynamic range” or HDR imagery. Many of these “HDR” images are characterized in part by a surreal or otherworldly feeling accompanied by an ethereal glow surrounding the subject. I think the term “HDR” was ill-conceived in this context. There is such a thing as a high dynamic range image, but you wouldn’t be able to view it because it contains more tonal data than you can perceive or that a computer monitor could display. A true HDR image would be processed into viewable images by compressing its range; essentially by running it through Photoshop’s “levels” or “curves” (but not in Photoshop, because Photoshop probably couldn’t open it).

The HDR images you see on Flickr and PhotoSIG are actually compressed dynamic range because they portray scenes that had too much tonal range to be captured in a single frame; the range of tones from highlight to shadow are compressed into the range of a normal image. This is usually achieved by making two or more frames at different exposure settings and combining them using Photoshop or one of a number of standalone and plug-in softwares for that purpose (such as Photomatix, PanoTools, etc.)

It’s easier to understand (for me, at least) using pictures, so here is an example. The two photographs below were taken of the same scene, a scene with too much range for my camera to see full highlight and shadow detail at the same time. One of the photos is exposed to capture the highlight data completely and the other is exposed to capture the shadow data completely.

Below the photos you can see their histograms (I just snagged these from Photoshop’s histogram palette). Notice how photo #1’s histogram is biased toward shadow data and photo #2’s is biased toward highlight data. You can see from the pictures themselves that #1 has a much cooler looking sky, while #2 has the detail you would probably want in the subject (in this case, a humble charcoal grill). (more…)

It was a very seasonable Spring day this afternoon with highs (finally) in the upper 50s, low 60s. I spent some time down at Harkness Memorial State Park getting back into the swing of things with my particular brand of abstraction.

These photos were all processed with my brand new copy of Adobe Lightroom 1.0, which I purchased after participating in the public beta since it was released and I admit it, I’m hooked! The one photo here worth saying more about is the first one, an oddly glowing charcoal grill. I attempted a technique that has been generating a lot of buzz lately; so-called HDR or High Dynamic Range. I prefer to call it Compressed Dynamic Range because I think it’s more accurate, but I’ll do a whole post about that later on.

Suffice it to say, the photo was created by combining two photos with different exposure settings (handheld!). It takes a bit of Photoshop to make the slightly different handheld photos line up, but I’ll do a post about that some time, too. I should also mention that despite the veritable glut of software available for this (like Photomatix, Photogenics HDR, PanoTools, etc.), and because I am both cheap as well as old-school, I achieved the effect entirely in Photoshop.

Without further ado.