HDR photos

Rick Stirling

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kros/sets/72057594073655609/

I've been pushing the tonal ranges of some of photos for a while, but I stumbled across this set - I love it.

TomDunne

Wow, those are incredible. How are images like that generated?

KDR_11k

I suppose a 16 bit per channel camera and a filter that picks the subrange to be displayed according to the average brightness of the surrounding pixels.

Vailias

ahh no its the normal way
just bracketed exposures (multiple shots at different fstops) combined through a program/plugin to compile them to a "perfect" photo. Beautiful results though.

Thegodzero

Wow they all look like in game shots. Is that supposed to be a good thing? Me i thought the idea was to get games to look like photos not get photos to look like games...

oXYnary

Photoshop cs2.. automate. merge to hdr.

Xenobond

Cool find, Rick!

Toomas

They are made from multiple "normal" shots or single RAW.

fogmann

There was an article about HDR photos recently, I forgot where, maybe New York Times magazine or Washington Post magazine or who knows, and they showed that same Walk of fame HDR and wrote about Kris Kros and his Flickr photo adventures with HDR, explaining the techniques mostly used by HDR photo bloggers.

I second what thegodzero said - those indeed look more like game snapshots.

hawken

well bad news for those who think that what the eye sees shouldn't be in photos, HDR cameras are on the way!

pior

Weird, I don't know if it comes from being used to 'classic' photography, but all these look really flat to me...

Strange also , I always thought that HDRI was used in CG to make things closer to reality - and here it is sortof used to make reality looking more like CG :O

Cool technique nonetheless. I would love to see it used in more subtle ways.

Oh , I'm pretty sure my eyes don't see lens flares, thankyou!

sevenfingers

I did a test recently, where I tried to mantain more or less the difference in levels seen in normal photos, but still get some coverage in teh highs and low's. I agree completely that the effect just looks wrong and flat when overdone.



This uses a whooping 12 exposures, an added advantage was noise reduction

JordanW

it looks like in the photos in the link arent just HDRI photos, it looks like they're taking the medium range from all of the exposures and using that in the final image, kinda like doing a high pass filter in PS, I dunno I'm not sure I like the look of most of them, however there are a few that look cool. Its just that on some of them you can tell it doesnt do it as well because things get outlined and such.

hawken

probably the best example of HDR is the inside of churches or sunsets. Most HDR images look bad because the photographer is bad at using photoshop... They might as well use a bloody solarising filter!

The reason why churches are great is because of the stainglass windows. Ordinarily ones eye would scan around the interior of a church, the iris changing as you look to various points of interest. Obviously with a camera it can only take one image that you later scan over, and with a camera, you can only get one light value to work with. What HDR enables you to do is to make an image that when seen by the human eye, resembles what your combined experience was.

done subtly and correctly, this can look amazing. Even some films are starting to use the process - as I say, HDR CDD's are a reality and soon we will be taking HDR photos without even knowing or caring. No more sun bleaching behind portraits or dimly lit interiors.



Although before HDR trend-whoring, virtually the same effect can be made with a tripod and a very long exposure.