High Dynamic Range (HDR)
I’ve been playing around with various ways of combining multiple shots of the same scene (with varying exposures) into a composite image. the result is an image with more detail in the highlights and shadows than any one of the source images had, and this technique is known as HDR. Photoshop has a way to do this, and I also have a dedicated HDR application called Photomatix that does a good job.
Here’s a sample from very early this morning over on Yesler looking down on I-5 and the Smith Tower:
And looking east across Lake Washington at I-90:
For some more extreme examples of what’s possible with HDR, check out the Stuck in Customs HDR tutorial by Trey Ratcliff.
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 7:19 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on February 16, 2008 at 10:56 am Tom wrote:
Wow — some of the shots in the tutorial you link to look like screenshots from video games. That’s cool. Your bridge shot is great, too — how many exposures are contained in that one? Just two? One for the foreground and one for the buildings in the background?
on February 16, 2008 at 12:54 pm Doug wrote:
These are each made from three exposures. On the Seattle skyline they’re 2 F-stops apart, and on the I-90 bridge they’re 1.3 F-stops apart. And the way I did this was kind of lazy compared to what he does in that tutorial, because I just wanted to try the basic concept. There are many options in Photomatix that I’ve not experimented with yet.
Added later … I’ve been playing around with Photomatix and am starting to get the hang of this. Here’s an HDR shot of our neighborhood, taken at 5AM this morning from the I-90 bridge. (Our house is right in the center.) And here’s a shot from the same place, but facing west instead of north. (For our Chicago friends, that’s the final mile of the Kennedy — I-90 ends shortly after that tunnel.)
on February 17, 2008 at 10:14 am Doug wrote:
I can’t stop … here’s a shot of my building on the Redmond campus this morning when I got to the office. No problems getting a good parking spot today.