Why HDR?
For many photographers, the term HDR is associated with a style of photography that is rather absurd – the grunge look. I’ve heard experienced photographers say they don’t use HDR because they don’t like the results. When the beta version of Photomatix, a product created by HDRsoft, made its debut on November 20, 2008, it automated a manual process that landscape photographers were using at the time. Occasionally, they would encounter situations where the dynamic range of the scene they wanted to photograph was greater than what the dynamic range their camera’s sensor could capture. So, they took two shots at different exposures that, when put together, covered the whole dynamic range of the scene. Then they stacked the two images in Photoshop and created masks to expose the highlights from the underexposed image and the shadows from the overexposed image. The final result was an image that captured the full dynamic range of the scene. Photomatix simplified this process by doing the blending. But instead of blending just two images Photomatix could blend three, four or even five images.
Photomatix also gave the photographer a choice on several different ways of blending the images. Grunge was just one of them and it took off like wildfire. There were a few grunge photos that were excellent, but most were mediocre at best. For many people, HDR became associated with the grunge look which gave it its bad name, and it became poor taste to shoot HDR.
But dealing with dynamic ranges in a scene that exceeds the technologies of the day wasn’t new. It goes back to the beginning of photography in the 1860s. After all, all cameras so far have a limit to the dynamic range they can capture whether they use Daguerreotypes, wet plates, dry plates, film or digital.
Continue reading “Why HDR?”(114)
