Fun with HDR

Our eyes are very sensitive to light and color, many times more so than digital cameras. Most consumer TVs, and LCD monitors are limited to just 256 incremental brightness levels, from black to white. So most pictures taken by cameras will have a range of 256 levels of brightness so they can look proper on computer screens. That's why if we are indoors on a sunny day, we can read a book on the couch or look out the window and see that the sky is blue. But if we want to take a picture of something outside, everything in our room becomes dark, and if we focus the camera on our book, then the outside sky blooms out to white. The camera is not robust enough to view the entire range of light going on in the scene. This is where HDR, or high dynamic range, comes in. HDR in photography means we have to take multiple shots of the same subject at different brightness levels (exposure settings) and then combine them into a single image after. The separate photos by themselves should look nothing special, maybe even plain and boring but when we combine the pictures together we get an HDR image. We don't need expensive equipment either, just about any point-and-shoot camera is capable of taking differently exposed images. Camera: Panasonic DMC-FX520 Software: Photoshop CS3 None of the 4 individual photos we took have a dynamic enough range to capture all the details we want in the scene, but by combining them together we now have 1024 levels of brightness and colors to look at instead of just the standard 256 mentioned earlier, hence the details once lost in the blacks and whites in the separate photos are now visible in the single HDR image. HDR photography can be used to add details to an otherwise too dark or blown out scene, and to capture the surrounding like how our eyes would see it. Applying too much range however, past our eye's range limit, can lead to some very surreal images that are almost painterly.

 There are tons of other applications for HDR images. Other than photography they are also used in movies, games, studio art, optics, digital rendering, computer graphics in general, and many other fields. Definitely fun stuff.