Producing Realistic Images with High Dynamic Range

Dynamic range is the range of light that can be captured in an image, from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights. Your camera, even if it is the most expensive brand, can only capture a limited dynamic range as compared to the human eye. Our eyes, which act as lenses, are instructed by the brain to capture multiple areas of a scene to create a composite view continuously. Your camera's film or digital sensor, on the other hand, is not as powerful as the brain to handle multiple processes, it can only take a single snapshot at a time.

For example, when you take a landscape photograph of a mountain beneath a clear blue sky, the resulting picture, more often than not, will have a good exposure of either the mountain or the sky but not both. The exposure settings used to produce the correct color and details of the mountain will produce an almost-white sky while the exposure settings used to produce a blue sky will make the mountain appear as a dark silhouette. Neither film nor digital cameras can use different exposure settings on select areas that are part of one scene. To capture the dynamic range of the mountain scene, the common practice is to apply complicated, tedious, and time-consuming traditional photography techniques. Conversely, you will not find any difficulty viewing precise colors and details of the scene using your eyes.

PhotoImpact, always on the prowl for better solutions to your photography woes, has the High Dynamic Range feature. This feature compensates for camera limitations and resolves exposure problems that photographers frequently encounter when shooting scenes that contain dramatic differences between highlights and shadows. It produces a composite image from pictures of the same scene taken with different exposure values. To fully grasp the functions and toolsets in HDR, this tutorial is divided into two sections. These sections include:

A. Applying HDR to Bracketed Pictures

• Learn how to apply and use the tools within HDR to bracketed pictures.
• Learn about the crop, rotate, and resize options of HDR.

B. Applying HDR to a Single Image

• Learn how to apply and use the tools within HDR to a single image.
• Learn about the crop, rotate, and resize options of HDR.

HDR essentially resolves the limitations beset by your camera equipment. By realizing these limitations, you learn how to work around and find a solution to achieve your goals. However, you should remember that these HDR tutorials are simply starting points on how to improve dynamic range. If you later decide that you want deeper shadows or pronounced highlights, you can always change the settings to fulfill your imagination. Digital photography is an art that is sustained by creativity and not technical specifications.