HDR of the ruins of Burg Hayn in my hometown
Flickr link
In the last few weeks I have tried myself once again at the creation of HDRs. If you don’t know what that stands for, HDR means High Dynamic Range. The human eye can see much more differences between light and dark than a camera lens. So to get closer to the results you will see in reality, you can use a technique that overlays several different exposures of the same shot to get an end result that is closer to what one really saw. At least that is one way of looking at it… Others use HDR to compose pictures that are more artsy than pictures and it is sometimes hard o grasp that both types of shots were made using the same technique.That being said, I much prefer realistic looking HDRs, so mine look more like that, too.
For the shot above I combined three different exposures of the same scene:
Without HDR I probably would have gone for a shot between the first and the second one but I doubt that it would have looked like the shot above. I’m a Mac user, so I was on the lookout for a software that was compatible with Mac OS X for my HDRs. While Photoshop CS3 has an Action for creating HDRs it’s not my favorite option, I feel like I am missing options with that. Photomatix is probably the best known HDR program that is available for both Macs and Windows PCs but I don’t really like it. For one, it doesn’t have a really Mac-like interface and most of the artsy HDRs are being made with Photomatix, something I wanted to stay away from. So I looked on and found the perfect app for me: Hydra. It doesn’t have as many features as Photomatix (yet 😉 ) but it’s got a Mac-like interface, relies heavily on the CoreGraphics capabilities of Leopard and, best of all, it already has a plug-in available for Aperture – my photo processing and organizing app. So I don’t even have to leave Aperture to make a HDR of my pictures, which is really convenient.
So, how about you? Have you tinkered with HDRs yet? Which software did you use and what were your results? As for me, I am sure that I will do a lot more HDRs in the future! You can find most of my HDRs in my Flickr HDR album. And remember, you can click on the pictures in this blog to see big versions.
