I've been really interested in HDR lately, but I haven't been able to try it until now. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. If you have ever used a camera, you will probably notice that your pictures never look exactly like what you see in real life, and the scene that you see with your eyes usually looks nicer than the picture. This is because cameras can't record as great of a range of tonal detail and light as our eyes can. To try to fix this, you can take an HDR image which you can do by taking the same picture at three different exposures and then combining them. One picture should be normal, one should be under-exposed, and one should be over-exposed. The combined image (the HDR image) will have much more color and tonal detail than a normal picture.

So I borrowed my neighbor's camera that has an auto-exposure-bracketing feature which means that it will simultaneously take 3 pictures - one under-exposed, one normal, and one over-exposed.


So here is the process that I went through. My lighting situation wasn't too good, but I went through with it anyways:

The normal picture:


As you can see, there is quite a bit of lost information. The area outside of the window and the tile underneath the cabinets are blown out.

The under-exposed:


This one has much less light, but there is more detail in the brighter areas (the window, below the cabinets, etc)

The over-exposed:



Now, the merged and tonemapped image:


Much better. This has a lot more color than the previous three and more tonal detail.


Now I took the tonemapped image and brought it into Photoshop for the finishing touches. I leveled it, cropped it, got rid of the yellow color-cast, fixed the blown out areas in the window and the tiles by using the under-exposed picture, fixed some of the reflections on the microwave and the oven, and got rid of all of the spots from the dirty lens (on the ceiling, etc)


Final product:

This is pretty cool, never heard of HDR before. Nice work.

Yes, I've never quite seen anything like this before,
this is amazing.
It almost looks like a really well painted picture.

Thanks for the comments.

This was just a test though. I'll post some actually decent pictures that I took that I used this on either tomorrow or Tuesday.

you have a really nice house man, as well as some nice photos
what do you plan on taking pictures of

Quote from Dark

you have a really nice house man, as well as some nice photos
what do you plan on taking pictures of

Thanks breh. I'm in a photography class and our assignment was architectural photography. I already took the pictures and edited them, but I need to get them from my school computer.

Maybe I'll make a new thread sometime down the road with other pictures that I'm satisfied with.

Please make more so I shall stare at them for long periods of time.

IMPRESSIVE! This is something to be in awe with. Keep up the good job.

Here's a recent photo that I took that I used this technique on. I didn't have a tripod with me at the the time, so I just hand-held it. There was only a slight amount of shake, so Photomatix was able to automatically correct it.



larger image: http://i783.photobucket.com/albums/yy118/Strung56/photography/jcc-final2.jpg

Hmmm, a new one. Well, I say that the other was more impressive since it makes reflections that make that art nice. You know what I'm saying?

I love the detail you get with this technique! Great work... I'm sure you could sell a lot of these!

shit man, that's really cool. I love the clarity it gives. Actually made me read up on the stuff, so now I'm going to try and do some myself. I don't have a decent camera, though, but hopefully I can borrow my dad's.

Quote from Zyven

Hmmm, a new one. Well, I say that the other was more impressive since it makes reflections that make that art nice. You know what I'm saying?

Well, the first one was mainly just to show the capabilities of HDR. The second one was an actual photo for an assignment, and many teachers and professional photographers don't like heavy editing.

Quote from alive

shit man, that's really cool. I love the clarity it gives. Actually made me read up on the stuff, so now I'm going to try and do some myself. I don't have a decent camera, though, but hopefully I can borrow my dad's.

Awesome, make sure to post them if you take any.

Also I seem to have forgotten to post this one last time. I'm just going to stop updating this thread though and I'll post a mini-portfolio in a month or so.