Do you know what the hottest groups on Flickr.com is? It's "
HDR", where a group of people demonstrating their digitally enhanced "High Dynamic Range" photos. (Sounds boring but when BoingBoing released an article linking to them..)
Under the hood, HDR refers to the image format with 32 bit of dynamic range (means 65535 shades of grey between pure white and pure black). Comparing to the normally 8 or 16 bit of dynamic range supported by your average monitor and software, there's a lot extra information hidden in a HDR image.
"But what's the fun in that?" you may ask. Well, Here's why it's often called an ultimate photo processing technique. Have you ever been frustrated in a situation where you have to take photos of something under a shadow in a very bright, sunny day? Due to the limited dynamic range of your film (worse when it's a CCD), you either lose the details of the sky, or the shadow. Natually, you can take one overexposed picture and one underexposed picuture, and just merge them together into your 8-bit JPEG image. But guess what you'll get? a bland, grey picture.
Here comes HDR image processing for the rescue. By merging a set of images from overexposed to underexposed, a HDR image with very broad brightness scale is generated. The next step is what's the magic lies in -- downscale the image from 32 bit to 16 or 8 bit using an algorithm called "tone mapping" (specifically, "local adaptation tone mapping"). The resulted image, if adjusted right, could be very clear, color-rich. It could also be unreal, as if it is a painting.




For more pictures like that, go to
http://www.flickr.com/groups/hdr/You can do that too! What you need is (a digital camera and) a software that can do HDR merging and dynamic range downscale. There are two choices on the market. One is Adobe Photoshop CS2, which is probably installed on most home computers in China already. Another choice is
Photomatix, a small software dedicated to this sort of effects.
Here's online reference to HDR and related tools:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/hdr.shtmlhttp://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/photoshop-cs2-hdr-32bit.htmlhttp://www.hdrsoft.com/index.html