HDR Photography

An Addition: 7/19/07

I feel like I should add something, since it seems like a lot of people are landing here through searches. This is simple HDR exposure compensation without tone mapping. Recently, I've produced a few photos with tonemapping and put them on my flickr account. If you'd like, I can post a new article. Just contact me and let me know that you'd like me to. And now, the article I wrote a year ago:

A Brief Explaination

High Dynamic Range [wikipedia.org] is "a set of techniques that allow a far greater dynamic range of exposures than normal digital imaging techniques." Basically, it involves increasing the range of contrasts between the darkest darks and the brightest whites in an image to make a way more accurate representation of what the human eye sees. Most of the techniques and information in this page are from this article. According to that article, the eye sees well in excess of 50,000:1 range of contrasts, while film and conventional digital photography only record about 300:1.

Equipment

I used a Sony DSC-H1 5 Megapixel Camera (or at least that's what my Exif tags tell me; I used my parents' camera), a tripod and Photoshop CS2.

The Technique

Basically, the technique was to take multiple pictures of the same scene at different F-stop numbers and use Photoshop CS2's Merge to HDR option to get a High Dynamic Range. I have absolutely no clue what that does, but it involves computing how the camera takes in the environment and accounting for that.

The Images

They basically speak for themselves (click for larger image):

F-stop number: 3.2F-stop number: 4.0
F-stop number: 5.0F-stop number: 6.3
F-stop number: 7.1F-stop number: 8.0
...and the final result?

(Click for larger image)

Notice how the image captures details not even visible in any of the other ones (mainly inside the box). I could've gotten a little bit more detail in the box if I had set the exposure a little higher in Photoshop, but that would be at the expense of seeing the window clearly.

And it looks this good after JPEG compression and resizing! And this was done over only 30 minutes total, just playing around. There are a lot better things that can be done. Take a look at the other article I linked to before for some more interesting applications of HDR photography. The only drawback is that the scene has to be perfectly still and you more or less have to use a tripod.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the objects inside the box are supposed to be planets. They're styrophome spheres that are painted on. It was a science Solar System project from 2nd grade (which, at the time of this writing was 8 years ago). It's been in my closet ever since and I doubt most of my friends have ever seen it.