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October 30, 2006
HDR imaging
My new favorite digital photo toy is HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging. This is where you take three pictures, each at a different exposure, and then use special software to meld them together. It allows you to take a picture like this, where you would normally be able to see only the foreground with a bright, washed out sky behind, or a nice sky, with a dark uninteresting foreground.
These pictures are a huge fad right now on flickr (which is how I found out about the whole technique). Go on flickr and search for "hdr" and you'll see a ton of stuff. Including nice flame wars about home some people are "abusing" the HDR techniques.
To create my images, I bought Photomatix Pro, which (at $99) is way cheaper than buying Photoshop. If you want me to HDR a picture for you, send me three jpgs, each with a different exposure, and I'll merge them for you with the software. If I know you ;-)
Posted by billo at October 30, 2006 01:31 PM
Comments
You might want to play around with OpenEXR. It's a file format developed by ILM that allows to you store an HDR image. Unlike JPG or PNG you can adjust the exposure dynamically at any time after the image is created. It's usually used for rendered images (like frames of a film) but works great for photos too.
Posted by: Derek Young at October 31, 2006 09:51 AM