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There’s a new phenomenon sweeping internet photography circles: HDR imaging. It’s a technique that produces pictures which look hyper-real, but which most people assume are fake — the result of some arcane Photoshop trickery — when they first see one. But even though Photoshop is involved in realizing the images’ true potential, they’re not fake per se — this image of the Golden Gate bridge, for instance, contains no photographic information that wasn’t actually in this scene when the picture was made:
– and yet, obviously, this isn’t a picture of the Golden Gate that could be made in a single exposure by a traditional camera. Because the trouble with traditional photography is exactly that it relies on a single exposure to record all the information in a scene — all the shadows, highlights and midtones, which on any given day are so disparate from one another that not even your eye — much less a camera — can distinguish all their subtle gradations at once.
So in a simplified nutshell, here’s how HDR works: if you aimed a regular camera at this Golden Gate scene, you could either expose for the sky, and wind up with big blustery clouds but a muddy dark bridge, or expose for the bridge and the water and have a white, blown-out sky. Instead, the photographer put his camera on a tripod and took several pictures, exposing for different parts of the scene, and then carefully married them together in post. (We’re assuming in Photoshop, although I believe there are other tools out there now.) By the way, you can see a larger version of this shot and check out the rest of this photographer’s Flickr photostream here.
As high-tech as HDR sounds, however, it’s been around, conceptually at least, since the dawn of photography. Even Wikipedia agrees:
The idea of using several exposures to fix a too extreme range of luminosity was pioneered as early as the 1850’s by Gustave LeGray to render seascapes showing both the sky and the sea. Such rendering was impossible at the time using standard techniques, the luminosity range being too extreme. Le Gray used one negative for the sky, and another one with a longer exposure for the sea, and combined the two in a single picture in positive.
Here’s an early LeGray HDRI called The Great Wave:
Notice how the foreground water and whitecaps are perfectly exposed, as are portions of the sky, which would’ve been much brighter in reality.
Click on the photos to see larger versions of them, and explore their makers’ Flickr photostreams.
For more, check out Smashing Magazine.
This photoshop trick is pretty interesting…
posted by JT on 11-17-2008 at 11:45 am
HDRI is an important development in digital photography. Unfortunately you have picked up a series of quite bad examples where HDRI process was abused and pushed to absurdity.
The idea of HDRI is to produce the photos with contrast range that matches better the way the scene would be observed by naked eye. Best HDRI is not supposed to look “fake” or “unreal”. Quite the contrary.
posted by Stane on 11-17-2008 at 12:16 pm
@Stane –
Subtler HDRI isn’t very good for illustrative, introductory-blog purposes. But I agree, the extreme stuff isn’t always the best use of the technology.
posted by Ransom Riggs on 11-17-2008 at 12:38 pm
The one of the house made me think. This would be a great listing picture, easily skirting the MLS rules about ‘Shopping the pictures. Must look into it.
Oh, and Ransom: your website is the shnizz.
posted by Johnny Cat on 11-17-2008 at 2:17 pm
HDRI has been around in the 3D animation industry for years.
We often use HDR images to improve the realizm of reflective surfaces or to help illuminate scenes.
Although, Photoshop has HDRI filters now, they are a late comer to this technique.
posted by Morris on 11-17-2008 at 2:27 pm
Not to be a little anal or anything, but strictly speaking, these aren’t HDR images as HDR images can’t be directly viewed on a computer screen. They are tone-mapped images built off of those HDR files, which means that the high dynamic range of the blended exposure file is compressed down into an eight-bit image that a computer can display.
@Stane -
Who is to say what the idea of any sort of photography is, other than the photographer? In the case of the Golden Gate photo, we are talking about a landmark that has been photographed some billions of times. Maybe the artist just wanted to show a different way of seeing it than what those billions of photos already showed.
These are artistic photos, not documentary or journalistic. Not liking them is one thing, but you can’t say definitively what the point of HDR photography is any more than you can say what the point of sculpture is.
-Ryan
posted by Ryan on 11-17-2008 at 3:54 pm
Very neat article - I hadn’t seen anything like this before. But it would have been nicer if the acronym HDR (high dynamic range) had been defined.
posted by HeyBeckyJ on 11-17-2008 at 5:27 pm
Good article. I’ve been doing HDR for a few months but I didn’t know about LeGray. Excellent tidbit!
And please photo wonks, you need to stop referring to the “unreal” HDR treatment as abuse. There’s nothing wrong with using HDR to stretch the artform beyond realistic looking images. It’s called artistic expression and the boundaries of it should always be explored.
posted by Miles Maxwell on 11-18-2008 at 10:53 am
@Ryan
I agree art is hard to define, but I was aiming at something else. HDRI is on a good way of becoming one of famously overused Photoshop “effects”, and I think no one would like to see a good method sink to that level.
posted by Stane on 11-18-2008 at 11:04 am
@Stane
I agree — but it will sink, as every form of art before has done when in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what they are doing makes them sink. There is a larger problem with this as everyone with Photoshop (or, my preference, Photmatix) will have the ability to abuse their photos. But you can’t make a bad photo interesting just by cranking it up into supercontrasty HDR mode. Yes, supercontrasty is a word!
In the interest of full disclosure, I like creating HDR shots, and I’m occasionally guilty of torturing them. So I might be biased! :)
posted by Ryan on 11-18-2008 at 1:42 pm
Interesting you brought this up. I just took some pictures today of a local development that has reduced the prices of all their lots. I couldn’t resist the urge to take pictures of rows after rows of “Price Reduced!” signs on top of the real estate signs. I’m going to convert them all to HDR. ;)
posted by NicoNicoNico on 11-18-2008 at 4:37 pm
Fascinating article, I never realized that’s how these kinds of pics are made.
I wish there was a side by side comparison of these HDR shots & the “normal” shot. To my brain/eye there is just something fishy about them that I can’t put my finger on and while I understand the whole background vs foreground exposure, I think I need a more visual comparison.
posted by Yonit on 11-25-2008 at 9:12 am