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Showing posts from September 30, 2007

High Dynamic Range Images

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I've just spent some time playing with Photomatix an interesting little tool for creating High Dynamic Range images. What? If you have a digital camera, you probably know that they have a very limited dynamic range. Imagine you are taking a picture of a person sitting under a sun umbrella. If you set the exposure for the person, the surroundings will be over exposed. Set exposure for the surroundings, and the person will be underexposed. No matter how you adjust the settings, the camera doesn't have enough dynamic range to capture detail across the scene. HDR photography is kind of a trick. Put the camera on a tripod and take three (or more) photographs; one correctly exposed, one under exposed and one over exposed. Then merge the three images to create a single image with a higher dynamic range. That's the basic theory. How? Well, pretty simple really; get a camera and a tripod. Many digital cameras have an auto exposure bracket function; turn the feature on by setting ho