High dynamic range imaging

Loveable solitude on the Jutland heath

Heathland 

Heathland is favoured where climatic conditions are typically warm and dry, particularly in summer, and soils acidic, of low fertility, and often sandy and very free-draining; mires do occur where drainage is poor, but are usually only small in extent. Heaths are dominated by low shrubs, 0.2–2 m tall.
Heath vegetation is extremely plant-species rich, and heathlands of Australia are home to some 3,700 endemic or typical species in addition to numerous less restricted species. The fynbos heathlands of South Africa are second only to tropical rainforests in plant biodiversity with over 7,000 species. In marked contrast the tiny pockets of heathland in Europe are extremely depauperate with a flora consisting primarily of heather (Calluna vulgaris), heath (Erica species) and gorse (Ulex species).
The bird fauna of heathlands are usually cosmopolitan species of the region. In the depauperate heathlands of Europe bird species tend to be more characteristic of the community and include Montagu's Harrier, and the Tree Pipit. In Australia the heathland avian fauna is dominated by nectar feeding birds such as Honey-eaters and lorikeets although numerous other birds from emus to eagles are also common Australian heathlands. Australian heathlands are also home to the world's only nectar feeding terrestrial mammal: the Honey Possum. The bird fauna of the South African fynbos includes sunbirds warblers and siskins. Heathlands are also an excellent habitat for insects including ants, moths, butterflies and wasps with many species being restricted entirely to it.

High dynamic range imaging

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI or HDR) is a set of methods used in imaging and photography, to allow a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging methods or photographic methods. HDR images can represent more accurately the range of intensity levels found in real scenes, from direct sunlight to faint starlight, and is often captured by way of a plurality of differently exposed pictures of the same subject matter.

In simpler terms, HDR is a range of methods to provide higher dynamic range from the imaging process. Non-HDR cameras take pictures at one exposure level with a limited contrast range. This results in the loss of detail in bright or dark areas of a picture, depending on whether the camera had a low or high exposure setting. HDR compensates for this loss of detail by taking multiple pictures at different exposure levels and intelligently stitching them together to produce a picture that is representative in both dark and bright areas.

HDR is also commonly used to refer to display of images derived from HDR imaging in a way that exaggerates contrast for artistic effect. The two main sources of HDR images are computer renderings and merging of multiple low-dynamic-range (LDR) or standard-dynamic-range (SDR) photographs. Tone mapping methods, which reduce overall contrast to facilitate display of HDR images on devices with lower dynamic range, can be applied to produce images with preserved or exaggerated local contrast for artistic effect

Why HDR?

So why HDR?  You can ask yourself all day….. but instead I’ll tell you why, and give you a blaring example of…WHY!
When I first joined Redbubble.com I was floored by the amazing photographers I was surrounded by.  It was frustrating, here I was with my camera and no idea how everyone had such great pictures… where were mine?  12 years of photography, 10 years of Photoshop experience, and a Bachelor’s in Fine Art… where were my epic pictures?  I needed to know how they did it and what I was doing wrong.  I am the jealous artist, I always have been.  In college I used to single the best artist out in my class and strive to do better than them, even if it meant 13 hours a day in the studio.  Turns out I singled the best artist out and ended up doing my Senior show with him, Rick Davies, a great painter with an intense control of paint and atmospheric layering effects.
After scanning a couple of Redbubblers, I found the three letters that would change my life forever….HDR!!! No three letters go so well together, HDR, High Dynamic Range.  I ordered three books off of amazon.com and read, and read, and read, until my brain was a sponge sopping wet with HDR knowledge.  I grabbed my camera and said, “Let’s Do This!”
Auto Bracket…Check, Tripod….Check, Cable Shutter Release….Check, Beautiful California Landscape…. Check! I processed the images in Photomatix Pro, and there it was, love at first sight.  HDR has become a way of life for me.  I want you to experience it like I did, and more importantly, I want you to have the ability to do it too.  I will give you all of the knowledge necessary to do it.  Get yourself an HDR toolbox, I am going to help you fill it!
Here are 5 quick reasons of WHY HDR?  We will get into more reasons at greater length later.  Let this soak in!
1. Precise Detail
2. Impeccable Light
3. Life-like Texture
4. Capture what YOU see, not what your sensor sees
5. and the most technical reason, it just looks so cool!

Comparison with traditional digital images

Information stored in high-dynamic-range images typically corresponds to the physical values of luminance or radiance that can be observed in the real world. This is different from traditional digital images, which represent colors that should appear on a monitor or a paper print. Therefore, HDR image formats are often called scene-referred, in contrast to traditional digital images, which are device-referred or output-referred. Furthermore, traditional images are usually encoded for the human visual system (maximizing the visual information stored in the fixed number of bits), which is usually called gamma encoding or gamma correction. The values stored for HDR images are often gamma compressed (power law) or logarithmically encoded, or floating-point linear values, since fixed-point linear encodings are increasingly inefficient over higher dynamic ranges.HDR images often use a higher number of bits per color channel than traditional images to represent many more colors over a much wider dynamic range. 16-bit (half precision) or 32-bit floating point numbers are often used to represent HDR pixels. However, when the appropriate transfer function is used, HDR pixels for some applications can be represented with as few as 10–12 bits for luminance and 8 bits for chrominance without introducing any visible quantization artifactsPhotomatix Pro is photographic software developed by HDRsoft for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows and primarily designed to make the process of merging multiple photographs into high dynamic range images and then locally tone-mapping them back to LDR images, easier and more streamlined. By automatically blending multiple exposures of photos it has the ability to create 32-bcv cv vc it images and tone mapped images. These different exposures are best taken as three different RAW files. However, in some circumstances you can use one file and process the different exposures from this photography.An indefinite demonstration version of the software (which places small watermarks on the produced images) is available from the official website

This weeks video tutorial is focused on creating an HDR image in Photomatix Pro 4.0.  I have gone over this pretty thoroughly here, however, that is a lot of reading!  This video tutorial gives you a decent crash course in Photomatix and helps calm the nerves amongst all the intimidating slider bars!

One thing to remember, all of these slider bars and movements are subjective to the individual moving them!  You are the HDRtist you decide the outcome, I will provide the mentoring