What’s the name of that effect where you take 3 different exposures at different settings and then put them back together with very high contrast to give super saturated images.

Sorry for the poor explantion, but I’m sure someone will know what I’m on about.

HDR High Dynamic Range

HDR?

Cheers Simon and Mrs B

Geoff, check out Terry Ratcliff HDR landscapes.

http://www.stuckincustoms.com/hdr/

Love the one of Hong Kong he took

ski – impressive stuff. Thanks for the link.

HDR is great fun. Check out Vanilla Days for tutorials and lots of detail. In the meantime, here are some of my HDRs – some overcooked, some not…

Plant on here does some very nice photography, some HDR, some ‘vanilla’.

Worth having a browse through as they are very good all-round.

Linky to Flikr

Jeez they look ghastly! They look like CGIs from computer games!

Gee – thanks Mastiles! Well, the point is that you can overcook the effect all too easily. But then again, they are good for creating a certain effect – dont think of them as photos because they are heavily manipulated.

The technique is supposed to enable you to capture more of the range of brightness in a scene. Often it is difficult to expose a photo correctly to capture very bright and very dark areas. This method merges 3 or more images exposed for different parts of a scene. Thus you can get more information and capture more detail. Its particularly useful for pulling the detail in the sky out. The consequence of this though is that the algorithm can make things look unrealistic or cool or crap or arty. Depends on your point of view.

In my case, I tend to go quite light on the HDR effect and then manipulate things in photoshop afterwards with the aim of creating a particular effect – e.g. eerie looking castle.

Sorry StS – I was actually meaning the ‘StuckinCustoms’ ones – all very ‘overcooked’ as you put it.

Yours are much better (apart from the first which looks a bit like the opening scene for Wolfenstein on PS3 😉 )

I agree with mastiles, they look more like illustrations than photographs

Really like the shot of ‘Angel of the North’ tho.

No offence taken mastiles! Castle wolfenstein – that was exactly the effect I was after funnily enough! Anyway – I’m no expert at HDR – I just muck around with it for fun.

The stuff on vanilla days is much better – not overcooked linky

that was exactly the effect I was after funnily enough!

Quality! Job well done!

here’s an HDR shot i took at a stately home over the weekend:

theflatboy – that’s not an HDR is it? Its nigh-impossible to get an HDR from a fast-moving scene (unless the rider is seriously skilled at balancing).

I assume he could HDR the scene and just have the biker in shot on the correctly exposed one then play with masks?

Like the screenshot flatboy 🙂

coffeking – for a moment i thought you were talking about the Wolf pic 😆

as for the other one, obviously i didn’t take it, but you can generate virtual HDR shots by manipulating the exposures on single RAW image and creating the bracketing that way, means you don’t need to take a sequence of shots. I imagine that’s what he’s done.

flatboy is right – the image of the rider will be a pseudo-HDR. But it matters not. They have got more detail from the raw file by merging 3 versions of it. It is the tone-mapping component of that merge that makes it look weird.

Loving the ‘Wolfenstein 3d’ image – brings back memories from my school days when that was top notch graphics!