Using HDR to capture the sun.

Downtown Kelowna in early October - HDR with 7 photos.

HDR (high dynamic range) allows you to capture highlights and shadows beyond what a single image will give you.  Although raw images are able to capture an impressive range of shades, sometimes it is just not enough.  This is especially true if you want to capture the sun in your shot and not overwhelm the sky with blown-out highlights.

You can actually do a lot with a single raw image, but you have to dip into your bag of tricks.  Photoshop comes with a great masking feature that lets you effortlessly select the sky (see below image).  I took a single image, applied a mask to the sky, and processed the sky and the terrain separately.  It came out not too bad, although I like the HDR photo better.

Single image masked and then processed.

The advantage of HDR is that you can pull a lot of detail out of shadows and highlights that a single image just can't manage.  The trick is to take a lot of photos over a wide range of exposures.  I shot 9 images from -4 to +4 stops; I didn't use the most overexposed ones because they added nothing to the compilation.  The disadvantage is that it requires more time and you have to have decent HDR merging software to finish the job, and instead of one raw image you end up with a bunch.

I have three programs which include Photomatix, Nix HDR, and Photoshop.  I have used all three to varying degrees of success.  For this photo, I used Nix 2.  It does take a modest amount of playing around to get the effect you are looking for, fortunately, there are a lot of presets that make the process easier and you can finesse the results even further after you make a selection.  

An interesting thing to note was the lady walking through the image; she was in a different position for each of the 9 images I photographed.  The HDR program let me pick the one I wanted to use as the anchor and it dispersed with the rest of them.  This removes ghosts from the image and produces a vastly improved shot.  Maybe I should have left the ghosts in, after all, Halloween is coming.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com

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