High Dynamic Range Imaging

So Fall is almost over for some and right in the midst for others. Either way it is a GREAT time to take some amazing photos. over then next few weeks, I would like to share a technique that I have found to be facinating and while I am still learning the technique, I thought it would be a great thing for me to write about it. So what is High Dynamic Range Imaging.

Wikipedia says this

Image Processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.

High Dynamic Range Imaging was originally developed in the 1930s and 1940s by Charles Wyckoff. Wyckoff’s detailed pictures of nuclear explosions appeared on the cover of Life magazine in the mid 1940s. The process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range, was first reported in 1993, and resulted in a mathematical theory of differently exposed pictures of the same subject matter that was published in 1995. In 1997 this technique of combining several differently exposed images to produce a single HDR image was presented to the computer graphics community by Paul Debevec.

This method was developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures. With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy-to-use desktop software, the term HDR is now popularly used to refer to this process. This composite technique is different from (and may be of lesser or greater quality than) the production of an image from a single exposure of a sensor that has a native high dynamic range. Tone mapping is also used to display HDR images on devices with a low native dynamic range, such as a computer screen.

So over the next few weeks I will be digging deeper into the realm of HDR as I have found 3 different techniques to use to achieve HDRI.

Hope you all enjoy!!!

P.S. the photo is not mine it’s author is Paulo Barcellos Jr.