High Dynamic Range Photos

If you are not familiar with HDR photography, the process involves combining several images taken at different exposures to create a single image. The final image contains a full range of details from highlight to shadow. The human eye can see details across a much broader range than any film or digital sensor. You can stand inside a dim room and see both someone in the room and the scenery out the window. In most cases, a camera can only capture the details inside the room or the details outside the window. If you expose for the room, the window will be washed out with no details. Expose for the sun-lit window and the room will appear dark and shadowy. Until recently, it would require multiple exposures and lots of retouching to accomplish the same thing in a photo.

The Dynamic Range Optimizer (DRO) engine included in all the Sony Alpha dSLRs provides a form of in-camera HDR. While DRO is a step in the right direction, I think a true HDR photo offers a number of advantages.

Hydra is Leopard only

I haven’t been able to try Hydra out as yet, because won’t be available for download until sometime this week. Apparently Creaceed will take the wraps off the new program at Macworld and make it available for download at the same time. Accordingly to the website, there will be a evaluation version available, so you can try it out before parting with that $39.95. Before you get too excited, be aware that Hydra only runs on OS X 10.5 Macs, so if you haven’t upgraded to Leopard yet, this program isn’t for you.

I’m emphasizing the price, because the leader in HDR applications is Photomatix Pro 2.5.4, which lists for $99.00. The latest version of Photoshop also includes some HDR tools, but Photomatix Pro is generally considered superior. If Hydra can approach the quality of Photomatix Pro, then that $39.95 introductory price makes it a real bargain.

Although I haven’t been able to get my hands on a working copy of Hydra as yet, the Creaceed website has some interesting preview videos. I won’t go into the details here, because it is worth your while to explore the Creaceed website and watch the videos.

From the videos, I’m excited about the Hydra’s possibilities. You can blend up to four images, which is less than some of the other applications I’ve tried, but should provide plenty of data for most HDR creations.

Like any good Mac application, Hydra supports drag and drop, so it is a simple matter to drag your images into the working screen. Interestingly, Creaceed has included matching tools that allow you to blend a series of hand-held images into a single HDR image.

HDR without the tripod?

This last point is important, because the general HDR workflow involves taking a series of images on a tripod, exposing each one differently to record the full range of highlights and shadows. Creaceed claims their matching mode will allow you to create a HDR photo from a series of hand-held shots. Basically, the application allows you to manually move the stack of images around to match them, then uses a software routine to attempt to line everything up perfectly. I can’t say how well this works, but I am intrigued. The ability to create hand-held HDR photos could go a long way toward making HDR more attractive to general photographers. Overall, I’m taking this with a grain of salt. I want to try it before I endorse the HDR-without-a-tripod claim.

Hydra also gives you a full preview of the blended images and allows you to adjust each image to obtain the HDR details you want. You have to watch the blending video to see this in action. It looks very cool and I am looking forward to creating some custom HDR photos with this advanced blending option.

In the right hands, HDR can be stunning

Some people don’t like HDR photos, because, like any new photographic process, early users tend to overdo the effect. We’ve all seen HDR photos that looked fake, surreal or disturbing. In the hands of a photographer/retoucher with a good artistic eye, however, HDR photos can be truly stunning. Try searching on Flickr for &qte;HDR&qte; and see what come up. You will see many poorly done, over-the-top examples, but you will also find some incredible images that will take your breath away. Consider this nighttime HDR image of a Russian submarine by Alkhodarev. (Note: This image opens in a new, full-screen window.) Of course, I doubt Alkhodarev used Hydra to produce this image — the application isn’t even available until later this week. As example of a beautifully done HDR image, however, this image is second to none.

Of course you don’t want want to shoot everything in HDR. There are plenty of subjects and lighting conditions that don’t lend themselves to HDR. Yet, I believe that HDR and DRO images will become more and more common in the years ahead. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, check out the Creaceed website and download the Hydra demo when it becomes available. For less than $40, you can start experimenting with High Dynamic Range and see what you can do with this fairly new medium. If you have a Leopard equipped Mac, I think Hydra is well worth acquiring at the intro price.

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Right away, I can hear a number of compact camera owners shaking their heads. “My camera only shoots JPEG, I can’t shoot RAW!”

No, your camera records in RAW, then an on-board processor inside the camera converts the data to JPEG or TIFF. As far as I know, no digital sensor actually records in JPEG. JPEG isn’t a data acquisition format. Each sensor records in some flavor of RAW. Strangely, only the better, more expensive cameras give you access to the original RAW data, even though all cameras capture it.

Your camera against your computer

This is more than an exercise in semantics. The processor in a dSLR probably weighs less than a quarter and takes up less space than a compact flash card. The processor on my desktop Mac, however, is the size and weight of a small brick. Which do you think can do a better job at converting data into an useable image?

Of course the desktop CPU has to be able to perform a variety of tasks, while the in-camera processor pretty much just concentrates on converting images on the fly. So the camera processor is quicker and moire efficient.

Quick and efficient isn’t a true measure of quality, however. It is undoubtedly quicker and more efficient to mold a chair out of plastic than to hand build one out of oak, maple or mahogany. Yet few people would even to think to compare a plastic chair to a hand-built wooden one. The former is efficient, the latter is quality.

So I’m saying I trust my desktop computer to do a better job at transforming the data from my camera’s sensor than the tiny processor inside the dSLR..

This hardly a major concern, however. I will concede that most in-camera JPEGs are fairly good — at least as far as the JPEG format will allow. However, post production in good image editor offers a world of options not available in the camera.

The JPEG format is an efficiency expert

Let me say once again that I am not totally against the JPEG format. For use on the web or a multimedia presentation JPEG excels. Think of JEPG as one of those efficiency experts telling everyone to get rid of extra baggage. “If you don’t need it, throw it out!”

RAW is a pack rat

Meanwhile RAW is a pack rat. It knows you can’t possibly use all the data collected on the sensor. Yet, it can’t bear to part with any data. “Yeah, I know you aren’t using this data right now. But I hate to throwaway all these perfectly good pixels. I’ll just set them aside out of the way in case you want them someday.” That is why the RAW image can provide better images. It contains much more data, which that big desktop machine can process to create a superior image.

If you doubt that, turn on clipping and examine the histogram of similar RAW and JPEG images in Adobe Lightroom. If your original image us properly exposed, you will usually see clipping in the JPEG, while the RAW image will display a smooth, unclipped graph. Of course, depending on the subject and lighting, some images will display less of this clipped area and some more. The majority of the time you will see clipping in the JPEG, because the image doesn’t contain sufficient data to display a smooth histogram from one end of the scale to another.

Need more dynamic range? Shoot RAW

This is why most photographers believe thy can see more dynamic range in a RAW image. I say most, because some photographers claim to see no difference. For my part, I believe there can be no doubt that RAW images can produce better dynamic range. Once again however, there are a host of factors involved, such as lighting, subject matter, exposure and the skill of the post-processor. If the person processing the RAW files lacks the knowledge and experience to pull all the details out of the RAW file, it won’t look any better than a JPEG. In some cases it will look worse. That isn’t the RAW image’s fault. We have a wealth of tools designed to convert RAW images into useable formats. Unless the user has the know-how to get the most out of the tools, however, the tools won’t be of much help.

Are you smarter than your camera’s internal processor? If you learn to get the most out of the software tools, I think you’ll find that post-processed RAW images produce consistently better results.

For more information on how a RAW processor works, see this article on the RAW file Format. (Off site link, opens in a new window)

Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think!

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When I acquired my first digital Minolta, I started shooting RAW because all of the top photographers recommended it. The truth is, however, I didn’t really see much difference between RAW and JPEG. I understood that the RAW image was capturing more data and therefore I should be getting superior images. Yet the difference didn’t seem that great.

RAW applications are much more than image converters

What I didn’t understand was that my early workflow was effectively canceling out most of the RAW advantages.

At the time, Adobe had yet to release the Adobe Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop. So the only way I had to process my RAW images was with the Minolta software that came with the camera.

I’ve used Photoshop extensively ever since version 2.0. I spent some ten years retouching high-resolution images for major advertising agencies, so I know Photoshop inside and out. The idea of using Minolta’s less featured application seemed counter productive. I knew how to get the results I wanted in Photoshop. I wasn’t sure I could get the same results from the Minolta app, So I simply used the Minolta application to convert my RAW images into TIFFs and then brought the TIFFs into Photoshop for my post processing. Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Of course by converting the RAW images into TIFFs with the default camera settings, I was losing the major advantage of working with RAW data. TIFF images usually contain more data than a JPEG, so I might have gotten slightly improved images with this method. What I didn’t understand, however, is that you need to edit the RAW images before exporting them to get the maximum tonal range. Since I was determined to adjust my images in Photoshop and Photoshop didn’t have a RAW import function at the time, I was leaving a whole lot of pixel information behind when I converted to TIFF.

RAW images: the advantages start to show

The dawning of comprehension came when I was in the studio shooting a vibrantly colored board game for a presentation. I was shooting with tungsten lights, so I set the camera’s white balance to a custom setting to match., After shooting for a while, I broke out my off-camera flash. You guessed it, I forgot to reset the white balance.

When I imported the resulting images into my Mac, those flash images featured excellent contrast and tonal range. Unfortunately, because they were shot under the wrong WB setting, they featured a pronounced blue hue. Anyone remember Aqua Velva aftershave? These images looked like they were shot through a big bottle of the stuff.

While I suspect that I could have retouched the images to make them look more natural, I wasn’t looking forward to it. Photoshop has lots of tools for adjusting color balance, but I knew that it would be a challenge to neutralize the blue without adversely affecting the rainbow of colors on the board. Fixing one color would throw off another — leading to time consuming cutting of masks, making alpha channels and creating selections.

While I was mulling over my options, trying to determine if it would be better to spend hours retouching or if it would be best to re-shoot the whole thing, I noticed a white balance drop-down in the Minolta converter. With nothing to lose, I changed it to electronic flash and viola! In less then a second the blue hue vanished and all the game’s colors shown through in their wonderful, natural tones,

RAW image data to the rescue!

This worked, because I was still working with the RAW data. Had I exported the images to TIFF or JPEG (or shot the images directly in JPEG) the WB would have been locked down and the only way to correct it would be through painstaking retouching. Since RAW images have the ability to contain an infinite amount of WB settings, it was a simple matter to adjust to RAW image to the correct setting before export. Shooting RAW had saved me hours of work — whether in Photoshop or in the studio re-shooting.

A couple of weeks later, I was shooting a basketball game in an indoor arena. I was concerned about image noise, so I tried shooting at an ISO 0f 400. That didn’t allow me to shoot at fast enough shutter speed. Still wanting to avoid a higher ISO I switched to a flash unit. This gave me a fast shutter speed, but the flash wasn’t powerful enough to illuminate the scene unless the action was right in front of me. After about a dozen shots that appeared very underexposed on the LCD panel, I finally switched to ISO 1600 for the rest of the event

RAW doesn’t really care about ISO limits

When I imported these images, I was ready to throw the ISO 400 flash stuff away. The images were too underexposed to save, At least they would have been if they had been JPEGs. Sometimes you can rescue an underexposed JPEG in Photoshop, but these were just too far gone. By the time you got the exposure somewhat correct, the image would be a low-contrast muddy mess, with very little detail in the shadows. Since this is true of JPEGs, I thought it would be true of RAW as well.

Before tossing the nearly black images, however, I decided to experiment with adjusting the tonal range in the RAW converter. I opened the histogram palette and clicked on the “auto settings” button. I wasn’t expecting anything significant, yet a few seconds later I was looking at fully exposed image with plenty of detail in the shadows. I couldn’t believe it. The image was noisy, but it was fully usable. I ran some noise reduction software and had a salable image.

No way would a JPEG have been able to stand that amount of image editing and produce a useable image. The RAW image, however, saved all the data it captured, so even though I was metering at an ISO of 400, the RAW converter was able to “push” the ISO up to 1600 without losing detail. Yes the image was noisy, but under those lighting circumstances 1600 was the only viable option. Because I had shot in RAW, I was able to obtain that 1600 ISO even though the camera’s meter was set on ISO 400.

I’m convinced — I shoot RAW

Since then, I seldom — well never actually — take my camera off of RAW. In my last post, I did list some times I thought JPEG might offer some advantages. Thus far, however, I haven’t needed to resort to JPEG. It’s there if I should need it, but the more I shoot RAW, the more I prefer it over JEPG.

Next time I want to list all the RAW advantages. You didn’t think I was going to stop with just these two, did you?

Agree? Disagree? Tell me what you think!

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In reading these discussions, I was amazed at the number of comments from photographers who are opposed to shooting RAW. Several people indicated that they never shoot RAW because “post production” was just too much work – it took too long, it didn’t offer much benefit, yada, yada, yada.

Let me get this straight. These people are interested in buying a $1,400 dSLR but they aren’t willing to expend the relatively minor effort needed to get the most out of the camera? To my mind that is like buying a new Corvette and only driving at 25mph on straight roads with no curves. It might be a pleasant drive, but it is not what ‘Vettes are built for. By the same token, dSLRs are built to require post-production to achieve the best results. That’s just the way it is.

RAW versus JPEG: the controversy continues

I realize that the RAW versus JPEG controversy has been going on since the dawn of the dSLR, but I didn’t realize there were that many JPEG holdouts. If you are one of them, please don’t be offended if I seem to be ridiculing the JPEG format. There is nothing wrong with JPEG – it’s just that RAW, IMHO, has so much more to offer.

Continuous Advance: where JPEG shines

Of course there are times and applications when JPEG is the better format. Chief among these is action photography – when you want or need to shoot a motor driven sequence. In all the Minolta and Sony Alpha dSLRs I am familiar with, shooting JPEG ups the frame rate and allows more frames to be recorded in a sequence. The new Alpha A700 will allow you to shoot 18 RAW frames at 5 frame per second, but if you switch to JPEG you can capture as many images as you can fit on your memory card at a steady 5fps. The A100 will also shoot until you fill your memory card when shooting JPEG, but the frame rate is only 3fps. If you shoot RAW with an A100, the maximum number of images that can be captured in a single sequence is only 6. Clearly, this an area where JPEG shines.

Instant printing requires JPEG

A second area is when you want to use your images instantly. You might need images for the web or a Powerpoint deck. If you shoot JPEG you can skip post processing and upload the JPEGs right off your memory card. I have also seen more and more photographers start offering “instant printing” at events and functions. They haul along one of the new dye-sub printers and crank out some instant promotional prints that they can handout during the affair. It’s a great way to get your name and contact info in front of a crowd, and you don’t need to haul along a laptop, because these tiny printers can print directly off a memory card – no computer required. These printers can’t process RAW images, however, so you have to feed them JPEGs.

While these quick turnaround situations might be seem to be a good reason to shoot JPEG, don’t forget that many dSLRs, including the Sony Alpha A100 and A700 offer RAW plus JEPG settings. In this scenario you can use the JPEGs for instant turnaround, then process and make images from the RAW files when you have more time. So you have the best of both worlds, instant access to the JPEGs; and RAW files that you can use to create superior photos when the time allows.

Not enough hard drive space: try JPEG

A third area whee JPEG images seem to have the edge over RAW is file size. Typical JPEGs are much smaller than RAW images – resulting in quicker recording speed and reduced hard-drive storage. So you can typically store more JPEGs on a given memory card or hard drive. This may be a consideration for some, but with today’s inexpensive memory options, I don’t feel it is worth the trade off.

Are there any other advantages to JPEG over RAW? I can’t really think of any. I can, however, think of a host of advantages to the RAW format. That will be the subject of my next post.

Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think.

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