One of my last hobbies is making HDR photos. The High dynamic range is a set of techniques consisting in combining different shots of the same static scene with different exposition values into one single image. This way it is possible to achieve an ideal illumination of the different parts of the scene, creating images of great beauty.
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| The Big Ben (London) | The Rathaus (Vienna) |
There are several ways of combining the original pics, with very different final results. Usually three shots are made, one under-exposed (darker), one normal and one over-exposed (clearer). To mix the three images, we’ll usually take the darker parts of the over-exposed shot and the clearer parts of the under-exposed one, and put those parts over the “normal” image.
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| Original 1: Over-exposed | Original 2: Normal |
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| Original 3: Under-exposed | Final result HDR |
There are many different techniques and programs for creating HDR image. Although it would be possible to use just a photo editor software like Photoshop or Gimp, I use mainly the Qtpfsgui, which is open source and available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS-X. It is quite easy to use and the results are really great. In any case, if anyone wants to try it the “hard way”, there are many tutorials online explaining the procedure, like for example this one.
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Different effects applied to the same scene at Burano (Venice - Italia)
One important thing to note is that the source photos must match exactly, which can be difficult even using a tripod (and impossible without), unless you want to find strange things in the final result. In this photos is possible to see some usual problems when creating HDR images:
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| The clouds move too | Several “phantoms” (people moving between shots) |
More examples of my (poor) tries of creating HDR images in my flickr set
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