What is HDR?

Does this sound familiar?  You go on vacation and see beautiful scenery.  You take a picture of it because it was so beautiful.  But, when you look at the picture later it just doesn’t do the scene justice.  Either the picture lacks the full color of the scene, or parts of it are too dark or too bright, or the details are just too flat.  Well, there’s a reason for that.

The human eye can see almost 3x the light range that a camera sees.  When we view a scene with shadows and bright spots we can see the details in both places.  Our eyes adjust to the wide range of light so fast we don’t even notice it happening, and so we see the entire range of light in a scene.  When you take a picture of that same scene the camera only captures about 1/3rd of what we see, and the rest is either too dark or too bright.  But, thanks to advances in technology and software we are able to recreate this kind of scene using a technique called High Dynamic Range photography, or HDR.

HDR is a combination of 2 or more pictures of the same scene with the camera set to capture different light levels.  This allows you to record a much wider range of light than a single picture allows.  Using software you combine the pictures into a single image with all the details that you remember when you were there.

It is not as easy as it sounds.  First you have to have a camera that can take multiple pictures in rapid succession.  This means a high end point and shoot or a DSLR camera.  It is highly recommended that you have the camera on a tripod, too, because you don’t want the camera to move during or between each of the pictures.  If anything in the scene is moving it will not line up properly when you combine the pictures later.

Next you need the software that does the bulk of the work combining the pictures.  There are many ways to tweak and edit this process, and the combined image always needs some extra cleaning up before it looks good.  None of this is particularly difficult, but it is an investment of time, money and equipment to make these images.

The final image will be much closer to what you remember of a scene, but they can also be more than that.  Some people, intentionally or not, take the tweaking to extremes and produce images that look nothing like reality.  That isn’t to say it is wrong to do that, but it is a matter of personal taste as to whether you like an over-processed or a realistic image.

As technology advances it will become easier to make HDR images.  It would not surprise me that in 5-10 years the average person will do it automatically with their camera without having to think much about it.  Already there are smartphone apps and cameras that can automatically take the multiple pictures and combine them on the device.  Right now the images they produce are far below the quality of manually setting up the multiple shots and combining them with good software.  But, they will only get better as technology improves.

The pictures I’m including are some of the HDR pictures I’ve taken.  I’m also including a version of what a normal, non-HDR image of the scene looks like for comparison.