There is a lot of negativity toward HDR images and new techniques but there always is at the beginning. Give it a try!!

i download the programs i will give it try

thanks

First, to those who express the sentiment that the only ‘valid’ HDR is the kind that uses the more realistic tonemapping algorithms…get off your high horse please and step down to Planet Earth. There is no *right* when it comes to Art, or any medium used to create it. When I created the images above, I intentionally selected my tonemapping algorithm and variables to trash them up. My intention was to create something gritty and convey the feel of the revised-urban nature of the downtown where I live while leaving them unretouched in the traditional sense. The intent wasn’t to accurately render them in the sense that WYSIWYG, the intent was to create art. Duh.

Second, there seems to be some confusion though in that some folks think that many of the HDR images they’ve seen have not been tonemapped. You can choose to not tonemap an HDR image but it will look like crap on a regular monitor…will seem like it needs a major contrast adjustment. Nearly *all* HDR images that you see on a regular monitor have been tonemapped, but some algorithms just produce a more realistic result than others. In fact, you can see this in another item in my HDR set (the Sears Tower view). Again though, for these images I made a specific choice in my tonemapping algorithm to achieve a specific artistic result.

Finally, if you just don’t like them that’s perfectly fine by me. Quite honestly, that’s what art is all about and there’s no accounting for taste. Even bad taste.

i am really sick of the ‘brown is real’ movement in graphics. seriously guys, its getting annoying. i’m sick of seeing perfectly good images washed out.

http://leftyloosy.com/lakepowellhdr.aspx

As for the continued discrepancies between unaltered photography and HDR/Tonemapping, I feel that both have their place. Each can be visually appealing, depending on how presented. It took me a while to even want to switch to digital, simply because I felt it was destroying my creative process.

QtpfsGUI is an awesome piece of software, if you’re looking for multiple tonemapping algorithms to play around with. I don’t recommend running every photo you take through here, but some are going to be breath-taking, just like a well-composed photograph.

few days ago i was scanned a very little part from a cd-rom (the photo-detector) with my scanner and the result was not so great, but as i converted the picture to lab color space from rgb i’ve noticed how much more information was in the two color channel so i was converted the lightnes and the two color channels to one grayscale image and adjusted the levels, the result was a more informative image…

A plate filter mount and a good gradient ND filter will do most HDR work that people are after. I have used 2 Gradient ND’s in a plate filter on the front of my Rebel XT to create pretty much the top image in one single click of the shutter.

Digital photographers should be forced to shoot film for a few months to actually learn photography before they touch a digital.

YES! There is a place for HDR, but 90% of the photos, if shot right would not need it.

I’m not normally one for plugging but there’s an instructable on how to do hdr (the subtle lighting-enhancing sort not the surreal photomatix sort) with no magic tools or downloadable photoshop actions, just a few simple photoshop/gimp procedures at http://www.instructables.com/id/HDR-photos-with-the-GIMP/

I apologise for the incredible wordiness, if you know your way around the gimp you can probably do it in half the time I described there (I was a n00b at the time of writing and haven’t updated it yet).

HDR can’t(read: shouldn’t) be used in all photographs and it should be used sparingly and as subtly as possible – if used in such a way it can be a valuable tool for photographers to capture otherwise impossible photographs.

Another subject worth looking into is exposure blending which through a somewhat similar process can extend your image’s dynamic range but by doing so without intoducing the telltale HDR signs such has the halos around areas of contrast. Exposure blending: http://luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml