In short, HDR images are made up from three or more images taken at different exposures.
Have you ever wanted to take a picture of a perfect scene, but you find your foreground or background just don't come out how they seem to your eye? For example, a sunset where the foreground is perfect but the sky is washed out. Or a field of bright flowers and blue sky, the sky is vibrant but the flowers loose their charm?
The camera can only give you exposure for your image to a certain degree, it cannot give you the perfect exposure for both your foreground and your background. The exposure it uses will affect the whole image, so what suits the exposure for one element of your image may not be the best exposure for another element.
HDR is designed to let you edit all those different exposures together so that you have a final picture that includes all of these appealing aspects that you want to keep.
When you switch on bracketing, the camera gives you a range of different looks that you can play with in post production. It takes 3 or more images (depending on how many you tell it to do) at different exposures. This gives you each element of the image at different exposures. I will use some pictures I took on a Canon 60D this morning as an example.
Always shoot in RAW if you can as RAW allows you to manipulate an image much more without degrading the quality too much. ( I shot with RAW and Large JPEG switched on so that I could upload examples quickly)
So this is the HDR image I created from the bracketed images:
And here is the image with standard exposure:
So as you can see, it's very pale and whilst it looks nice and crisp, it leaves the sky quite washed out and I'm sure you can imagine this wasn't exactly what the eye could see otherwise the world would look pretty pale to us.
So the tree with the snow came out about right, but I had to sacrifice the blue of the sky and the suns highlights on the tree in order to capture the snow covered branches.
So I set the camera to do bracketing and it took one exposure that was too dark (-3) and one exposure that was too bright (+3). By taking these pictures, I am now in control of a range of exposures that will give me access to more colours and shadows as well as more highlights depending on the look I'd like to go for.
Here are the two bracketed images:
Underexposed (-3)
Overexposed (+3)
So whilst, in ordinary situations I wouldn't ever want the picture to be so dark or so light, by underexposing one image, I have obtained the blue of the sky and by overexposing the other, the highlights are much more pronounced (perhaps a little too bright).
So now that we have these images, we can use software to merge these together and pick out the aspects we like the most.
So lets just quickly look at the bracketed images together.
The other great thing about making HDR images, is that the software does a lot of the work for us. We just sit there while it processes the image.
As I said, I will make a video on how to create HDR images as I am new to this but it seems fairly easy to pick up.
If you want to create HDR images yourself here's some things to think about:
1 - Use a tripod, you will be taking 3 pictures (or more) in a row so you don't want the camera positioning to change.
2 - Pick a location where there's a nice range of colour, brightness and shadow so that you have more to work with.
3 - Have a look at your camera and its bracketing options. You can also do bracketing with focus but I will cover that at another time.
Whilst I advise using a tripod - I actually didn't because I really dislike using tripods just by personal preference. I made sure that I had a fast shutter speed and a low aperture and that I stayed VERY still during the picture taking. I also had it on multi shot so that I didn't have to press the shutter button more than once.
Anyway, here is the HDR image one more time and I will put another one that I did just in practice.
Happy snapping everyone :)
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