Delving into HDR

As part of my ongoing mission to improve my Photoshop skills, I've been reading about HDR (high Dynamic Range) processing.

I've been working my way through Scott Kelby's awesome book, The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers - it's SO practical! It's literally a step-by-step guide on how to do a bunch of stuff in Photoshop CS5.

According to Scott, when you increase the dynamic range of the photo, you get a greater range of tone and light than today's digital cameras can create, which gives you an image closer to what the human eye captures.

Photoshop CS5 comes with Merge to HDR Pro - a module that pretty much does everything required to take one or a series of images into "photorealistic" look right through to the "hyperreal look" which HDR images seem to be renown for.

Scott's book tells you how to set up your camera to shoot HDR, and then goes through the steps to get an image that started off as something like this:

to this:

Ok, so it looks Photoshopped to bejeezus, but I kinda like it - this is way more towards the "hyperreal" end of the scale than the first photo, which is the actual correctly exposed image that the camera took.

I also tried processing a few images HDR-style, where I manually changed the exposure in Photoshop - again, cheating, according to HDR-purist rules, but hey - I like experimenting. Watch this space for more HDR experiments!