Introduction to HDR - What to Know
- 1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Six Things to Know About HDR What Does HDR Stand For? It stands for High Dynamic Range, allowing you to take a picture with a greater dynamic range than what’s usually possible. What IS Dynamic Range? It is a measurement of the range of different light levels. It defines the amount of contrast present in a picture - from the darkest black to the brightest white. It becomes possible to capture scenes that contain either a lot of contrast, or have very little contrast. Pictures taken in midday sunshine usually turn out poorly as cameras can’t cope with the full range of light levels. The opposite is true for low-light scenes, muted shadow areas are now visible with HDR. What are the benefits of HDR? Other ways to achieve HDR? There are photo imaging techniques that can ease the restrictions introduced in low-light and high-light pictures such as ND filters and using a flash. Although, the results are limited to be viewed after the picture is taken. How does HDR work? A true HDR image is created from several shots of the same scene taken with slightly different exposures. Each shot captures a part of the tonal range, which are then combined together to create one image - containing all of the tonal range. A true HDR file contains 4.3 billion shades in each color channel, and is stored as 32-bit files. Compared to a JPEG image, which contains 256 shades in each color channel, and is stored as 8-bit files. To bring down the file size, a form of loss-less compression is required in the last stage of the HDR process. What are typical files sizes of HDR? Source: http://www.digitalcameraworld.com