Admittedly, I’ve seen some shocking examples of HDR and it’s really easy to overdo the effect. In fact if you were to ask a group of people what an HDR image looks like, you’re likely to get wildly different opinions on the subject. There seems to be a trend emerging to use the HDR processing technique to turn normal photographs into something else entirely. Photography may have been the starting point for these images, but it seems to be veering into the crazy world of fine art.

The majority of HDR shots that I’ve seen look way overdone. The colours either look overly saturated to the point of garish or curiously have very weak pastel shades. There will quite often be strange halos and a weird, sort of ‘blooming’ effect. Personally, I think this stuff look awful. It’s really quick and easy to get results like that. It seems to me that all the detail that was revealed in those dark and light areas is being overused. Consequently making the entire image look quite flat, as it now lacks the depth that those light and dark areas provided.

A lot of people seem compelled to defend really bad HDR images. They claim that all art is subjective and that declaring it good or bad is purely down to personal taste and opinion. At the same time you’ll find a lot of people quite willing to say that, actually, yes there are some pretty poor examples of HDR out there.

I’ve seen some awful images that have been created using HDR processing. But I don’t actually hate HDR as a technique because I’ve seen what can be achieved with it and I really believe that we shouldn’t be judging a technique by the worst examples of it, but by the best.

So what is HDR?

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range.
It’s basically become a term used to describe a way to ‘digitally develop’ your photos using the tonal information contained in multiple exposures of the same shot.

An underexposed shot will reveal details in the light areas of the photo which would otherwise be lost. Equally, an overexposed shot will reveal details in the dark areas of the photo. The shot with a normal exposure won’t have all that information in those light and dark areas, so a composite image of all three exposures can retain the interesting details from all three shots.

A lot of cameras support auto exposure bracketing (AEB) which can be utilised for creating HDR shots. It’s a good idea to also use a tripod and cable release, otherwise the shots won’t be identical and you’ll have all sorts of problems lining them up when you come to combine them. AEB will take the shots with different exposures automatically, all you have to do is set the EV (exposure value) of those shots. Once you have the shots, you can use various methods to merge them into a single image. There is a popular piece of software called Photomatix which is designed to do just that.

Download a trial version and see if you like it.

I’ve seen some amazing examples of what can be achieved by using HDR post processing techniques and I would advise people to not dismiss all HDR photography based on a few bad examples of it.

Don’t make your mind up as to what it is, without knowing what it can be.