A short presentation on High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography.

1. HDR Photography
by Tom Mouat

4. What is HDR Photography?
• High dynamic range imaging is a way to allow a greater
dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of
an image than current standard photographic methods.
• Normal cameras take pictures at one exposure level with
a limited contrast range. This results in the loss of detail in
bright or dark areas of a picture, depending on whether
the camera had a low or high exposure setting.
• HDR compensates for this loss of detail by taking multiple
pictures at different exposure levels and intelligently
stitching them together to produce a picture that is
representative in both dark and bright areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging

10. "Painterly"
• HDR is also commonly used to refer to display
of images derived from HDR imaging in a way
that exaggerates contrast for artistic effect.
• In a popular HDR software program this is
called the "painterly" mode…

13. Tone Mapping
• Tone mapping is a technique used in image
processing and computer graphics to map one
set of colours to another in order to
approximate the appearance of high dynamic
range images in a medium that has a more
limited dynamic range.

16. How do I take HDR images?
• Exposure is the amount of light allowed to
into the sensor during the process of taking a
photograph.
• On most cameras you can
adjust this manually.
• Take a minimum of 3 shots:
– One at -2, one at 0 and one at +2
• USE A TRIPOD!

18. Process the Images
• Download to PC.
• Combine using specialist software.
– Luminance HDR ****
– Picturenaut ****
– FDRTools Basic **
– Fusion **
– Essential HDR Community Edition **
– Photomatix *****************************

21. HDR Photography Handout
• Get hold of HDR software:
– Photomatix (pay), Luminance or Picturenaut (free)
• Work out how to use manual exposure on
your camera.
• Get a tripod.
• Choose you subject and take at least 3 shots
• Download and process.
• Enjoy!