High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photography – An Introduction

An Introduction to High Definition Range Photography

High Definition Range (HDR) Photography is a special photo technic to combine photos with different exposure. The same scene gets hereby a higher range of luminosity.
Many sophisticated cameras support capturing exposure bracketing with different settings. The combination of the result is made by postprocessing software. These have different parameters and options to choose and vary in algorithms.

Samples of HDR Images:

About HDR

HDR has a long tradition. it is a postprocessing of multiple images of the same scene with different exposures. This can be made with film as well as with digital images. In the following, we will focus on HDR in digital photography.

Digital HDR

Modern and sophisticated digital cameras have the possibility of Bracketing Setup to set e.g. amount of images (e.g. 3,5,7), the exposure difference steps (e.g. EV -2,0,+2) and the order of the exposure capturing.

Capturing HDR Brackets

Ideally, you use a tripod for taking HDR brackets, but modern HDR-processing software allow to combine also handheld HDR-Brackets: good HDR software can (geometrically) adjust handheld brackets.

Moving Objects – Ghosts

For HDR, multiple images are needed for the same scenery. In many situations, e.g. for landscape or cityscape hdr, you have moving objects (traffic, people, trees in the wind…) . To handle this, you may deghost these objects to be hidden. This deghosting may be done for the whole image or just for some selected areas of the scene.

Different HDR Algorithms and Image Settings

For the HDR postprocessing itself there exist various algorithms for different effects. Also more postprocessing settings may be used.

last update: 05.03.18
published: 05.03.18

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About Making HDR

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