A new trend in digital imaging is high dynamic range (HDR) photos. Unlike a typical snapshot which may not show all the details on the scene, an HDR photo is able to display high levels of details in the highlight and shadow regions. This is done by merging several photographs of the same scene taken with different exposures. It may sound confusing, but we've condensed the procedures into an easy tutorial for you to get started.
You will need: A digital camera with exposure compensation mode, tripod, and a PC with Adobe Photoshop (or other HDR software) installed.
Attach your point-and-shoot to a tripod because you'll require all the pictures to be of the same scene. If you shift your camera, there will be problems aligning the shots when merging them during post-processing.
Most point-and-shoots on the market now allow you to manually compensate the exposure. The increment may differ from 1/3 to 1/2, so find out how many stops you can step up or down. For this short tutorial, we will take three pictures--one underexposed by 1/3 stop, another with the recommended exposure, while the final image should be overexposed by 1/3 stop.
If you are shooting RAW format, you can take just one picture (especially useful if it is an action shot). Before converting them to JPEG or TIFF file, the bundled programs usually have an option for you to tweak the exposure. Compensate the exposure and use the "Save As" option to save three different files.
The most common application to merging photos is Adobe Photoshop CS2 or CS3. Unfortunately, Photoshop Elements does not support merging of pictures. But there are third-party software that can do the trick as well.
In Photoshop, click on File, then scroll down to Automate which will call up an option named Merge to HDR. Click on that and select the three files you want to merge before hitting OK.
Depending on your computer's specifications, the conversion may take some time to process. When done, you can tweak the image further to pull out more details if desired. Before saving the file, do note that the picture generated can demand quite a bit of space on your hard drive, so you may want to reduce the bit rate or scale it down to save some memory.
There it is! You have your first HDR picture. But as with most digital imaging techniques, there are no hard and fast rules. You can experiment in the post-processing stage by using more pictures with varying exposures to achieve different results or adjusting the levels and contrast of the final image to get different looks.
