{"id":408,"date":"2007-12-30T13:14:25","date_gmt":"2007-12-30T18:14:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2007\/12\/30\/high-dynamic-range\/"},"modified":"2007-12-30T13:14:25","modified_gmt":"2007-12-30T18:14:25","slug":"high-dynamic-range","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2007\/12\/30\/high-dynamic-range\/","title":{"rendered":"High Dynamic Range"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d been seeing a lot about HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photography. In layman’s terms, the dynamic range<\/em> of a camera is the range from the darkest to the lightest parts a camera can record in one shot. The problem is that the dynamic range of cameras doesn’t match real life that often.<\/p>\n

Long ago, photographers found a halfway decent solution: graduated filters. Basically, you stick a filter in front of the lens, with part of it darker than the rest. It’s great if, say, you want to take a great picture at the beach with both foreground detail and<\/em> the sky properly exposed.<\/p>\n

With computers, though, there’s been another photo. You take a series of bracketed shots: one or two for the sky, one or two for the foreground, etc. Some people have been known to stitch together close to a dozen. Having a tripod helps tremendously here, since the images need to be pretty much exactly the same besides exposure.<\/p>\n

Strictly, HDR requires more than a monitor can really display, but a technique called tone mapping is often used. The basic premise is to take the “good” parts of each shot in a bracketed series and stitch them together. Photoshop CS2 and newer has an HDR utility, though I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the results. Today I started playing around with an Open Source tool called Qtpfsgui<\/a>. It’s even cross-platform! It supports multiple algorithms for doing tone mapping, too.<\/p>\n

Overall, I’m still not that happy with the results, but it’s a start. Here’s a ‘normal’ shot of the beach, taken on Cape Cod yesterday:<\/p>\n

title=”Beach by n1zyy, on Flickr”>\"Beach\"<\/a><\/figure>\n

You’ll note that the foreground (e.g., the bench) is too dark, yet the sky is too light. It’s a good illustration of insufficient dynamic range.<\/p>\n

Luckily, I knew in the back of my head that I wanted to try my hand at HDR photography, so I saw it as an opportunity. I set my camera to meter -2 to +2 EV, to try to cover the full range. The end product:<\/p>\n

title=”Fattal Algorithm by n1zyy, on Flickr”>\"Fattal<\/a><\/figure>\n

It displays a very common pet peeve of mine with HDR photos: it looks entirely unrealistic. Absurd, even. I think part of it’s that it’s just overdone, and that the contrast is jacked way up. I want to play around with it more and see if I can get a more natural product. So far, no luck. But, at least in a technical sense, it’s an improvement over the first image.<\/p>\n

I’d like to see HDR come a little further, so that HDR photos don’t have the same, “Whoa!” quality that a scary old lady with way<\/em> too much makeup has. I don’t think the limitations are entirely technical at this point, either.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d been seeing a lot about HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photography. In layman’s terms, the dynamic range of a camera is the range from the darkest to the lightest parts a camera can record in one shot. The problem … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,12,18,20,22,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-cool-links","category-interesting","category-ocd","category-photography","category-programming","category-rants-raves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}