Is HDR ruining photography?

[Landrum Kelly]

"Is HDR ruining photography?"

 

Not unless you let it ruin yours. I don't touch the stuff myself.

 

--Lannie

[chwn]

Dave: You make a great point, but technology is only going to continue to change. I think that digital photography is still

relatively new and will greatly change over the next five years. So, you ought to just use the tools that work for you and stay

happy.<div></div>

[dlakelan]

<P>It's ruining many photos, but it has its place... Here's a link to <a

href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/10/35-fantastic-hdr-pictures/">"35 fantastic HDR images"</a>.

 

<P>I would say in this lot there are about 4 or 5 images that are very good, and a few more that are decent

 

<P>Here are the ones I thought were at least decent:

<ul>

<li><img src="http://88.198.60.17/images/fantastic-hdr-pictures/hdr-49.jpg">

<li><img src="http://88.198.60.17/images/fantastic-hdr-pictures/hdr-96.jpg">

<li><img src="http://88.198.60.17/images/fantastic-hdr-pictures/hdr-99.jpg">

<li><img src="http://88.198.60.17/images/fantastic-hdr-pictures/hdr-38.jpg">

<li><img src="http://88.198.60.17/images/fantastic-hdr-pictures/hdr-46.jpg">

<li><img src="http://88.198.60.17/images/fantastic-hdr-pictures/hdr-101.jpg">

<li><img src="http://88.198.60.17/images/fantastic-hdr-pictures/hdr-75.jpg">

<li><img src="http://88.198.60.17/images/fantastic-hdr-pictures/hdr-64.jpg">

<li><img src="http://88.198.60.17/images/fantastic-hdr-pictures/hdr-57.jpg">

</ul>

<P>

What these all had in common was the use of HDR techniques to let me see a wider range of brightnesses, without

eliminating the effect of shadow or giving an overpowering sense of ethereal glowing, as well as not having

motion blur or strong halos. Many of these might be doable from a single RAW photo at 14 bits.

 

Don't obsess about HDR so much, and try shooting RAW and getting some of the effect of the HDR from a single

shot. It might be a good compromise.

[g-man1]

the above look like paintings, not photographs.

[oistrakh]

I have to agree, these don't look like photographs, they look like illustrations, paintings, or computer-generated images. That's not to say that they're not good or not art, but I simply don't consider these things to be photographs. Just like a traditional B&W print that's been dodged and burned poorly doesn't look like a photograph anymore, most HDR pictures I see just don't look "real", so I don't consider them photographs.

 

And if they're not photographs, they can't be ruining photography, right? ;-)

[jammer_jammer]

What Chris said. Although I enjoy "some" of it, t's really almost a completely different art form in my opinion.

[swilson]

From steve mareno

"Boy, am I glad I shoot film! This is one less thing to worry about."

 

Nobody really needs to worry about it, I don’t really care for HDR photos much myself. But if you do like the look of

a HDR photo then you have to worry about is with film just as much as with digital. Getting the high dynamic range

is the easy part, it is converting all that dynamic range into the limited range that a print has, which is good for

maybe 5 stops. Even if you display the image on a monitor you will have a far less dynamic range then a single shot

from a DSLR captures.

 

Scott

[jim kerr]

Well, I don't really think so as there are so many actually doing any good with it. So many are doing so poorly at it, most will give up on it.....If Ansel Adams were still around shooting, he most certainly would be at the forefront......Jim

[ned1]

Pretty funny. After years of trying to explain it to them, people are finally realizing why film is better than digital, so now they are jumping through hoops to emulate it.

 

The good side is now maybe sensors will by designed with latitude in mind. Just like my Fuji S5 that nobody seems to want.

[ned1]

One note for those who think they don't see HDR being used commercially: Almost all architectural interiors are done HDR these days. They're just done well, so you don't notice.

 

You only notice HDR when it's done wrong.

 

HDR is digital film, that's all. If done carefully, 6 images will give you the dynamic range of B&W. 3 images gives you the range of color negative. The goal should be an end result you can push, pull, dodge and burn just like film.

 

In other words, a big step forward so we can get back to where we were 50 years ago.

[scott_warn]

Anyone remember Technicolor? One lens and a 3 way prism with color filters capturing R G B on black and white film. I wonder how long it will be before we see an HDR specific camera that uses a similar technique with ND filters replacing the color filters and 3 sensors capturing 3 seperate exposures at the same instant in time. It would be bulkier than a single sensor camera, however sennsor quality has gone way up and that might permit a hand holdable camera using something like the 4/3 sensor.

[Ian Taylor]

I should add that I agree 100% with Edward. My comments were aimed at the OTT stuff you see here and on Flickr. Most of it looks like it should be printed on black velvet.

<p>

For architecture, it's amazing. I don't often shoot that stuff, but I used it recently to solve a problem. I was shooting a housing development on Koh Samui and the range of stops was incredibly wide. So I just used HDR to blend 6 exposures. The results were OK, but would have been better had I actually known what I was doing with the software.

<p>

Here are the first and last exposures, along with the final result:

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.iantaylor.ca/samui/">Koh Samui</a>

[rivi]

Those "35 fantastic HDR images" are a bit more than HDR. They pull (overpull) all triggers PS has to offer.The

sky in the third (the palace) is actually taken from a Hubble Space Telescope image of the Ring nebula M57, for

instance.

[rivi]

Ups, it is the Helix M27, not the Ring M57. But then....

[at]

I like it...when properly executed. Just like anything else in this digital era it can be overdone, mis-used, etc.

I have played with it a bit and will continue to explore its possibilities.

[Peter_in_PA]

Uh... if you look at the way that masters like Adams worked in the darkroom, HDR is not new, and is not a fad, and is not

ruining photography. Bad photographs, whether HDR or not, will be bad, and good ones will be good.

[frankz]

Most of the HDR I see is overdone by far.

 

As for ruining photography, only an individual can do that and only to themselves.

[ned1]

HDR adds a bunch of new options to what you can do with digital images. If course, these are the same options film photographers have had in the darkroom for over 100 years. The main options are simple: Push, Pull, Dodge, Burn. Simple, but hard to use well. Master printers like Lee Friedlander work with only these four options, but it takes decades to master them.

 

Most people who look at an Ansel Adams print have no idea how much work went into the print. Adam's goal was to create something that looked totally natural, even if that meant a two-stop push followed by 20 burns. It wasn't uncommon for Avedon to make 80 separate dodge and burns. Yet most such manipulations are invisible.

 

For those who are wondering, true dodge and burn have nothing to do with Photoshop dodge and burn. One of the reasons that HDR images still tend to look unnatural is that PS doesn't properly support them. They have to be done with layers or history brushes which means the transitions are never smooth.

 

Digital HDR is very exciting in its possibilies. Now I'm just waiting for the software to catch up.

[dlakelan]

Part of the point of my "35 Fantastic HDR images" was that of the 35, I could only find 9 or so that I didn't think were terribly gaudy, and of those 9 only about 3 or 4 were pretty good (architectural shots mostly).

 

So it's easy to ruin a photo with poor use of HDR, and yet, it's a real benefit for certain types of shots (especially architecture, I agree).

 

And I've seen a movie of Ansel Adams dodging and burning his negatives extensively in the darkroom. This is nothing new, just something you can easily screw up if you overdo it.

[dlakelan]

Also, here's a question for the technical experts:

 

Canon sensors on the XSI and other recent DSLRs have a 14 bit RAW file. If you bracket a single JPEG by 2 stops in either direction (3 images) you wind up with an 8 bit base image, and then 4 additional stops of data from the two bracketed exposures. In theory a 14 bit RAW will have 14 stops of brightness information, whereas the 3 JPEGS will have 12 stops. In other words, the single RAW shot has broader range.

 

Is there an advantage to 3 JPEGs over 1 RAW? (the only one I can think of is perhaps reduced noise in the shadows) Obviously 3 RAW images with 3 stop bracketing would be the ultimate in HDR/latitude but I think it's going a little over the top to try to compress 20 bits of luminance into the final 8 bit JPEG or probably 6 or 7 bit (luminance) print.

 

What I'm trying to say here is that a single RAW image *seems* to have enough theoretical latitude to produce all the HDR you could ever use without gaudiness. What am I missing?

[ned1]

"3 stop bracketing would be the ultimate in HDR/latitude"

 

Architectural photographers I know regularly do 10.

 

This slightly over-the-top one took 13 different exposures to get the entire range. That's two more than the best color film can do, so yes, HDR IS the future if they can make sensors that do it all in one take. And that's coming from a film bigot.

 

Of course, this means nothing was bracketed. took several seconds to make all the changes. If you look carefully you can see that some of the people are transparent.<div></div>

[rustys pics]

Hmmm. Tripods, long/multiple exposures, blurry people. Seems like what photography was like 150 years ago.....

[dlakelan]

You CAN do 13 stop RAW multiple-exposure HDR but it is going to take a lot of work to convince me that it's necessary. With a 14 bit raw image, you could do a 3 shot bracket with 7 stops below and 7 stops above and mix those 3. The dynamic range is now 28 bits luminance. You ultimately have to produce a JPEG for the web which is going to have 8 bit luminance or maybe a single 16 bit TIFF for prints, but printed paper has lower dynamic range than a typical screen... so it's hard to imagine that you can get much useful from anything beyond 3 shots of 3 stops RAW bracketing.

 

If you want to be super fancy 3 shots of 7 stop manually dialed in RAW bracketing... but you just don't need more than 20 bits of *extra* luminance information (20 bits is 1 million times the information of the final result).

 

I can even imagine if you KNOW you want an HDR composite, just shooting RAW with 3 stops below and 3 stops above and no center shot. Would take a little more work, but an automated compositing program could work out a proper 16 bit image file combining the two, and then you could dodge and burn to your hearts content to pull out the extra detail.

 

I think where some of this falls apart is noise, but I still assert that even if the 14 bit RAW file has noise in the bottom 2 bits, and therefore only 12 bits of noise-free data, with a 3 stop bracket +- 6 stops you get 24 bit luminance information essentially noise free... 24 stops of data is PLENTY if you know how to work with it.

[john_richburg]

No, HDR is adding another dimension to photography. And next year there will be something else

as the digital world moves so quickly. New mediums/techniques bringing into the art of photography new

people- how can that be bad?

[ned1]

I needed 13 exposures so I could get color in the stain-glass windows (the one at the bottom is quite visible) and the pews in front of me, which had no direct lighting at all. On my spot meter it was EV 4 clear up to EV 16, plus one for good measure.

 

And Russ, you're right. It's very much like the early days of film before fast emulsions. The above example is an extreme one. Most of the time you can make do with 5 exposures, which means you could have used film and done it all in one shot hand-held.

 

And to the fellow who noted that these look more like paintings than photographs, yes they do. If that's what one wants then it's good. If it's not, well, use film.

 

It will be a while before film is obsolete.