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    Fine Art Photography: High Dynamic Range: Realism, Superrealism, & Image Optimization for Serious Novices to Advanced Digital Photographers
    Fine Art Photography: High Dynamic Range: Realism, Superrealism, & Image Optimization for Serious Novices to Advanced Digital Photographers
    Fine Art Photography: High Dynamic Range: Realism, Superrealism, & Image Optimization for Serious Novices to Advanced Digital Photographers
    Ebook194 pages1 hour

    Fine Art Photography: High Dynamic Range: Realism, Superrealism, & Image Optimization for Serious Novices to Advanced Digital Photographers

    By Tony Sweet

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    About this ebook

    Directions for working with two popular photo editing programs: Photomatix and HDR Efex Pro.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStackpole Books
    Release dateJun 15, 2011
    ISBN9780811744911
    Fine Art Photography: High Dynamic Range: Realism, Superrealism, & Image Optimization for Serious Novices to Advanced Digital Photographers

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      Book preview

      Fine Art Photography - Tony Sweet

      Fine Art

      Photography

      High Dynamic Range

      TONY SWEET

      STACKPOLE

      BOOKS

      Contents

      Foreword

      Prelude

      Photos

      Epilogue

      Equipment for HDR photography

      Product Links

      Acknowledgments

      Foreword

      THE JOURNEY INTO PHOTOGRAPHY CAN BE DIFFICULT FOR MANY CREATIVE people. It is a constant balance between the technical and the artistic. Before one can truly develop one’s own style, a firm understanding of how to control the tools of photography is essential. Only after mastering their function can one begin to explore one’s own inner creative drive.

      With advances in High Dynamic Range digital processing, a new frontier has opened up in modern photography. This new frontier has its own set of technical challenges. Understanding how to master them is integral to understanding how they will affect your image and, ultimately, creative expression.

      Tony Sweet’s always-evolving work shows how new advances in digital photography can lead to exciting and creative image making. Tony has become one of the leading gurus in High Dynamic Range photography, quickly absorbing and masterfully applying the wide range of processing techniques available in HDR. Whether it’s understanding field techniques to capture the most dynamic range in a scene or mastering the many postprocessing looks, Tony will guide you through all the steps to achieve the desired effect.

      His work is inventive, instinctive, and inspiring. But what makes Tony stand out in the field of photography is his generosity in sharing what he has learned with other photographers, both amateur and professional. He has an infectious excitement about creating images and that is passed on to those who have studied photography with him.

      You could not have picked a better mentor to start your journey into High Dynamic Range photography with than Tony Sweet.

      —Gregory McKean

      www.MasterPhotoWorkshops.com

      Gregory’s series, Master Photo Workshops, has released ten feature-length video titles on photography ranging from classic landscape techniques to advanced digital processing and High Dynamic Range. The series features top working professionals teaching their craft in the field and in the studio.

      Prelude

      HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE PHOTOGRAPHY HAS BECOME A STAPLE IN MODERN digital photography. It seems that everyone is generating HDR images these days. HDR images are all over online photo sites such as Betterphoto.com, Flickr, Smugmug, Photobucket, Picasa, Webshots, and so on. It’s become apparent to just about everyone that HDR has possibilities for image making that are finally accessible to any photographer using any digital camera from point-and-shoots to high-megapixel pro-DSLRs.

      It may be interesting to know that HDR is not new. Not even close. Here’s a brief history: The first recorded photograph that was the result of combining two images to achieve detail in the brightest and darkest parts of an image was created in 1850 by Gustave Le Gray. This technique is still practiced. What is known today as HDR was was originally developed in the 1930s by Charles Wyckoff. Wyckoff ’s detailed pictures of nuclear explosions appeared on the cover of Life magazine in the mid 1940s. Wyckoff implemented local neighborhood tone remapping to combine differently exposed film layers into one single image of greater dynamic range. After the development of the radiance image file format (RGBE), tone mapping made it possible to display HDR images on computer monitors. This technique was presented to the public by Paul Debevec in 1997.

      It was then a short trip to 2005, when Photoshop CS2 introduced the Merge to HDR function. Soon after this, what would soon become the industry standard for HDR software, Photomatix, entered the marketplace. Many HDR programs followed. Among these are Artizen HDR, FDR Tools, Hydra, and Dynamic Photo HDR 4, with more appearing, it seems, daily. The latest entry into the HDR software arena is Nik’s HDR Efex Pro. This is professional-level software on par with Photomatix. For the purpose of this book, we’ll be dealing with Photomotix and HDR Efex Pro exclusively. These two HDR programs are currently the choice of a great majority of professionals and serious amateurs. Many other HDR books have comparisons between the various HDR software, so that information is readily available. This book will forego comparisons, instead focusing on practical settings in many different shooting situations using the two most popular HDR programs being used today.

      HDR can have a stylized look, which can be the subject of debate in photographic circles. The range of HDR interpretations can vary wildly from absolute realism where the HDR intervention is invisible, through various levels of the HDR look to a complete departure from photography into the realm of nonrepresentational work. It’s all up to the maker. The important thing is that high dynamic range photography is a potent tool in our ongoing pursuit of higher levels of creative expression.

      In the real photography world, stock photography agencies tend to shy away from HDR images, as many of them look overprocessed. But it is possible to use HDR to achieve a much less artifical look, replicating what we see naturally. I’ve had natural-looking HDR images accepted readily and without question by stock agencies. However, I also like completely nonrepresentational interpretations, completely straying away from the photographic look. There are many people waiting to get in your face about the merits of the natural look, as opposed to the phony HDR look, but these are easy arguments to debunk. To paraphrase the great John Shaw, If I want to record things as they are, I’ll look at them. Glass filters, graduated NDs, color biases in films, processing techniques in digital, many raw converters that render differently, and so on, all alter the natural look of an image and move images into the realm of interpretation. The interpretive process is paramount in photography—otherwise, why not just take snapshots?

      The bottom line: High Dynamic Range has gained a permanent place with ever-increasing importance and popularity in modern digital photography. The sooner

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