How to Take (and Make) Composite HDR Photographs

You've seen them everywhere—online, in advertisements, on calendars and greeting cards. They're mysterious-looking, hyper-realistic high-dynamic-range (HDR) photographs, and you may wonder why your camera doesn't seem to have a setting to take them. HDR images combine details from multiple images taken at different exposures. With just a little extra work on your computer, you can make professional-looking HDR images yourself. Here's how.

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The human eye is capable of capturing and processing a broad swath of light levels at any given moment. This allows us to look out on a world filled with bright spots and shadows, and to see an extraordinary amount of detail in both at the same time. Compared to our eyes' hoover-like ability to suck up light, most cameras can only capture a narrow range of luminance.

High-dynamic-range (HDR) photography is a technique for increasing the range of light shown in a picture in order to create vivid, page-bursting photos that exhibit a distinct, often exaggerated, level of realism. These photos are usually created by combining at least three photos of the same scene, all shot with different exposure settings. The final picture takes the best elements from each photo and frankensteins them together into a picture that has more detail and pop than is possible with any single shot.

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This photo-mashing can be done with Adobe's $700 Photoshop, but unless you are skilled with some of the program's more complex controls, it's easier to use HDRsoft's Photomatix Pro software ($99), which makes the process virtually turnkey.

The first step is to pick your subject. The HDR effect looks best in scenes that have lots of shadows and highlights, such as outdoor shots at dusk or cityscapes at night (although portraits and indoor shots can look appealingly spooky). And if it's cloudy out, you can create dramatic, ominous images of cumulus-filled skies.

When taking the pictures, you'll want to follow what I call the Goldi­locks rule: Shoot at least one photo that's overexposed, one that's underexposed and one that's just right. You can change the camera's exposure manually and shoot these separately (in which case you will definitely need a tripod, which is probably a good idea anyway), but if your camera has auto-exposure bracketing (or AEB), as most new digital SLRs do, it will be much easier. AEB allows you to quickly and automatically snap multiple shots with different exposure settings.

Once you've uploaded the photos, open up Photomatix, click "Generate HDR Image," and select the pictures you want to combine.

Depending on how fast your computer is, the rendering process could take as long as a couple of minutes. And when it's done, you'll likely be less than impressed by the result, which will look murky and shadowy. That's because the new image is a 32-bit HDR image, and LCD and CRT computer monitors just aren't capable of showing the full range of luminance necessary to bring out all of the details hidden in these images' shadows and highlights. To turn the photo into a more useful format, you'll need to put it through a process called tone mapping, which brings these details into the forefront.

You should see a window, "HDR ­Viewer," which contains a button labeled "Tone Mapping." Click it, and your image will finally be transformed into a cool-looking HDR photo. In fact, you could probably just save this photo and call it a day. But it gets better.

You should now see a new window called "Tone Mapping Settings." This window will have a bunch of dials with labels such as "Luminosity" and "Color Saturation." Playing with these will add life to your picture. Have fun pulling them in every which way and watching your picture morph from a realistic-looking image into a surreal landscape. When you've got a picture you like, click the "Process" button, and the photo will be rendered to your specifications in a savable format.


Flickr HDR Gallery

(Photograph by Rick Harris)

(Photograph by Stuart Richards)

(Photograph by Javier Losa)

(Photograph by David J. Laporte)

(Photograph by SantaRosa OLD SKOOL)


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The final HDR photo combines details from multiple shots.

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