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HDR- Rights and Wrongs
By sirsnapalot | February 28, 2010
I have yet to do a write-up on HDR, but before I go down that road, I want to go on-record and say that HDR is *way* too much overused. There are sites like Stuck In Customs where nearly every shot is in HDR. While I like the effect and think he is a great photographer, HDR is but one tool in your toolbox. I much prefer the bulk of HDR to be more subtle.
I run a 3D Photography forum at http://www.3dphoto.net/forum, and one of the members (Carl Wilson, aka Sleightman) there posted this picture (in 3D- I present it here in 2D by his permission):
Great HDR by Carl Wilson- click on image to view in Flickr
The great thing about this shot is that it does not go into the unnatural look. The human eye is capable of much more visual range than is any film or digital camera. HDR is simply a way to claw back some of what we see in the real world. It is, in effect, compressing the picture, which is why it can easily be overblown.
In Carl’s shot- you have a challenging lighting situation. There is a bright, setting sun that he was shooting directly into. And, you have the shadow of the tree on the grass in the foreground. When standing there, the eye will see details in all parts, but the camera will not. If Carl set the exposure for the sunset, the grass would be nearly featureless in the shadows. If he exposed for grassy details, the sunset would be overexposed and blown out. So, if I recall from his explanation, Carl shot 3 exposures- one optimum scene-averaged exposure, plus an exposure above and below that setting. This produced three shots where different areas of the picture were optimized for details- one in the grass (the overexposed one), one for mid-level lighting (the optimum one) and one for the clouds around the setting sun (the underexposed one). Then he used Photomatix (the more powerful HDR processing solution) to generate this image using the best of all three images. Photomatix has a number of sliders, too, that let you pick just how you want to optimize this final image.
Here, in Carl’s shot, you have good detail in the clouds, and great detail and color in the grass, so you truly have the best of both worlds, and an image that is not overly processed and still retains a natural look about it. It helps that he also had great composition and subject matter here.
I am just beginning my exploration of HDR, so will post more blogs entries over time. I am debating to use Photoshop’s Merge To HDR feature vs. the more powerful (due to specialization) tool Photomatix ($99). In the future, I will try to create some “overblown” HDR’s to show as examples.
I decided to post this entry based on this posting: http://digital-photography-school.com/25-oustanding-landscape-photos-of-various-types-on-imagekind. I was a bit concerned that I was directed to 25 outstanding landscape photos, when in fact, many (but not all) of these are over-processed. Read the comments below lest you think I am alone in my thoughts here. They are nice images, but are not even close to representative in many cases.
My goal in photography is to learn as many techniques and tricks as possible, and to learn them well. Then, I plan to put those tips and tricks into my “Toolbox” and know when to apply one or the other, or even a combination. (This mirrors my professional life- I never became a specialist in any one area. I get bored too easily. I like knowing a lot of about a lot of things, then mixing and matching as I go along to keep life as interesting as possible.)
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Topics: HDR, Opinion | 1 Comment »
March 1st, 2010 at 09:50
Thanks for posting Jeff.
The settings were as follows: On a Canon Rebel EOS In Aperture Preferred Mode, f7.1, EV -2,0,+2.
Carl