What is HDR and how does it work?
[Foto: kimdokhac] HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and the only reason I raise this is that with Photomatix have started to ship a Light version for $39. There is of course a trial version also if you want to play around a little. I do not think there is something for a beginner, but it should probably be quite familiar with this with the various photographic applications work and results do not provide enough for all the hassles that HDR does. That does not mean that I can explain a little about it.
What then is HDR?
High Dynamic Range launched with to Photoshop, with CS2. What it does is that it deals with images that are exposed to various long to assemble in an image which has more information than what the camera can handle. Either it has taken several pictures at the same location with different shutter speeds (tripod is a must) or so takes up several images with different exposures from a RAW file. The information from both dark and bright areas are assembled into an image that has more information in all lighting zones. Most people blend different exposures together, they call it, toneblending.
After a little tampering with Photomatix , I must say that it is both cumbersome and buggy. It was tricky to understand how to select files to be merged. I had to do a separate folder where I put my photos with different exposure. The calculations take a long time and it may have great patience. The program bugged out several times. It was an old version. It may become better now. Just try and see.
Now if you are curious and want to explore more HDR, I think enough to FDRTools is a much better option. FDR Tools Basic is free for both Mac and PC so it costs nothing for you to try. This program takes images and makes the the 16 bit TIF format, so the final product will be substantially large files around 40 MB. Remember that jpg is an 8-bit format and tiff goes with a 16-bit colourspace.
It seems to me that HDR is a little too convoluted for it to be interesting, but if you’re curious, so why not try. Try FDRTools then rather than using an old version of Photomatix. You also have Qtpfsgui that is open source and free to use.
Update: There is a trial version of Photomatix Pro 3.2.7, which you can download at HDRSoft. I like not on trial versions and prefer to use a great free software or open source. Here you will find also a good tutorial on how to create HDR images with Photomatix. Always try things once and then come back to it later because you may understand more. Play around.
Learn more about HDR : Nature Escape’s article on HDR (also in pdf), Luminous Landscape, Wikipedia, Cambridge in color about Dynamic range, Cambridge in color about HDR , Flickr Group of HDR.
