Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Grand Canyon HDR

I was going through my photos I took this summer. And I suddenly remembered that I took some pictures of Grand Canyon that I wanted to post-process later but kinda forgot about them. So I did that yesterday. And I got this interesting HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo.

HDR is achieved by taking at least two pictures of the same subject at different exposures and then combining them in Photoshop or Photomatix for example. For this picture I took three photos. DSLR cameras have an option called "Exposure Bracketing". What this does is automatically shoots three pictures where one is normaly exposed, one overexposed and the last one underexposed. This way, when you combine them, you get a greater contrast range than otherwise. But for this technique you need to use a tripod.

There is also a way to get HDR images from a single JPEG or RAW image and that is called an artifficial HDR. More on how to do HDR photography in this well explained tutorial.

And that's it for now. I can't paste any EXIF data for this pictures as this is a merge of three pictures. The only thing I can tell you is that I did a Batch Processing of three pictures I took at the Grand Canyon rim in Photomatix Pro and then retouched the result in Photoshop.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

sorrry, i delited the first comment... 'bout the pic - love it 'cause it looks so unreal

Kristijan Žontar said...

yeah, HDR pictures usualy do :) here are some more HDR pictures on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=hdr&s=int&z=t

but HDR is sometimes the best option when it comes to proper scene lighting in nature :) Sometimes you want to focus on the foreground and you get a blown out sky... and this is the way to get around it in post-processing ;)