Don't hate the hammer

December 26, 2009 4:11 AM

Learn to use the HDR photography method effectively.

HDR has been mentioned here a few times. It caught a lot of flak. Mostly because people only noticed the more artistic use of the tool. The process, if done correctly, can deliver some outstanding images. Although, to some people, they will just look like a "normal" image.

posted by Soupisgoodfood (45 comments total)

Informational read, with nice photography of landscapes to boot!
posted by localhuman at 5:20 AM on December 26, 2009

HDR can make already breathtaking and spectacular landscapes and cityscapes even more breathtaking and spectacular. But is it of any use in interiors or portraits? I've grubbed around on the internet and found a few examples. But nothing that will convince my designers to commission HDR images for our publications. Is this even worth pursuing? Is anybody doing anything wonderful with HDR and rooms and faces?
posted by Faze at 5:27 AM on December 26, 2009

"Is anybody doing anything wonderful with HDR and rooms and faces?"

Yes. It's usually called 'lighting'.
posted by popcassady at 5:33 AM on December 26, 2009 [4 favorites]

Finally, a realistic approach to HDR.

Do it right, it works. Do it wrong, it's brutal.

Most HDR images found on the web fall into the latter category.
posted by bwg at 5:36 AM on December 26, 2009

But is it of any use in interiors or portraits?

The usual use for interiors is to bring the light levels outside so that they match the interior lighting. That way the windows aren't blown out, you can see the outside world, etc.
posted by fake at 5:37 AM on December 26, 2009

Although, to some people, they will just look like a "normal" image.

Well as fake argued in the previous thread no image you see on a computer monitor is a HDR image, unless you have esoteric hardware.
posted by Rhomboid at 5:42 AM on December 26, 2009

But is it of any use in interiors or portraits?

Examples. You do see it more and more in interiors, often for real estate photography. I don't know of any fine art photogs doing interior HDRs, but I'm sure they're out there.

Dave Hill does some HDR commercial portraiture, but his work is highly processed and conceptual generally. It's not my style, but respect to the artist. Others do it a bit more straight, but I don't think it's necessary. It's not difficult to light a person--you're not going to get a six-stop exposure spread on someone's face.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 6:42 AM on December 26, 2009

HDR is the autotune of the photography world. The general public loves the novelty of it, the professionals cringe at the lack of skill using it.
posted by toekneebullard at 6:54 AM on December 26, 2009 [7 favorites]

... and, like autotune, once the novelty value of overdoing it has worn off, its use will be scaled back to the point where its use is not noticeable to the general public, and it will become just one more tool in the producer's toolbox.
posted by kcds at 7:12 AM on December 26, 2009 [4 favorites]

HDR is the velvet Elvis, kittens and clowns with big eyes, sofa-sized paintings vomited forth through a dial-up account by the look whats I did in only my first week on a pirated copy of PhotoShop set. In their mom's basement. On Windows Vista.
posted by hal9k at 7:23 AM on December 26, 2009 [3 favorites]

A certain percentage of my work is shooting commercial interiors which generally have designed lighting. Think of spaces like a high end cosmetic dentistry suite.

HDR (misnomer that it is) is far and away the best way to shoot these areas nearly all of the time. The time on location is a small fraction of that needed using a lot of my own location lighting, and even with the HDR/tone mapping post production involved, the overall time spent is less.

Very few people who look at the photos I shoot in these situations would ever realize that they're "HDR" images.
posted by imjustsaying at 7:28 AM on December 26, 2009 [3 favorites]

Apologies for the rant above. Too much eggnog and too many relatives, one of whom has directed me to this Best HDR Photos of 2009 link saying "y'ask me, why if you could take those kinda pitchas hell you'd make a ton a money!"

Click if you must. Good idea to empty your browser cache afterward.
posted by hal9k at 7:36 AM on December 26, 2009 [1 favorite]

If i notice it's HDR (or really, tone mapped) it's too much.
But done with an eye toward the subtle, it can be a wonderful way to get highlight and shadow detail in the same image without it looking flat overall.

About 90 to 95% (OK, I didn't really count) of the images I see just look like crap. But the examples in this post work for me.
posted by cccorlew at 7:52 AM on December 26, 2009

hal9k, MY EYES, even with your warning, I clicked.
These must be examples of what not to do, but they somehow got mislabeled. That's the on;ly explanation.
Quick, back to the OP links to cleanse eyeballs.
posted by cccorlew at 7:56 AM on December 26, 2009

From the article: If you guessed the second image, from Scotland, then you are right.

I totally did!

However, I think this guy makes a good point. A lot of the "HDR" stuff out there looks like someone just ran the brightness through a highpass filter, that's where you get the 'halo' effects, and it just looks awful.

...one of whom has directed me to this Best HDR Photos of 2009 link...

I like that the link is called 'designora.com' Sounds like "Design + gonorrhea" or "design + diarrhea". And even if the pictures posted looked OK originally with they applied so much JPG compression that the results just look like refried shit anyway.

I mean check out the origional version of that Japanese scene vs. the one posted on the site. Or the origional version of the train vs. the one on the site.

People seem to have no idea how much over-compressing images ruins them. Either that or maybe they just have terrible monitors, or bad eyes or something.
posted by delmoi at 8:12 AM on December 26, 2009

> like autotune, once the novelty value of overdoing it has worn off, its use will be scaled back to the point where its use is not noticeable to the general public, and it will become just one more tool in the producer's toolbox.

I'm skeptical. Most of the photos linked to in this thread not only have HDR (to various degrees of damage) but also extremely saturated colors and wide angles so wide that the subjects are unnaturally distorted, building on the overriding aesthetic of whatever is good (color, a mountain, coverage of the subject), can be improved by having more of it rather than by deciding what to leave out. Photographers, having worked at getting more color, subject and light into their images, can now pack in more than they can control, and the photos -- even the photos cited as good examples -- have less verisimilitude than 3D renders. If that's the goal, then godspeed to the artist, but to my eyes it looks like a lot of effort for no useful purpose.

For that matter, I'm still waiting for autotune to become unnoticeable.
posted by ardgedee at 8:15 AM on December 26, 2009 [1 favorite]

None of those examples look perfectly natural to me, HDR or not, they look overly saturated and sharpened and, the one of the car hood defies the physics of light.

I'm skeptical

Me too.
posted by squeak at 8:30 AM on December 26, 2009

Something that I often notice with HDR, especially apparent in the photos in the post that include water, is that they resemble what you see when looking at water through polarized glasses - banded sections of water with different apparent reflectivity.

Is this actually an effect of HDR? What causes it?


HDR photographs are a blending of several exposures. Water moves, so even if these exposures are taken one immediately after another, the images won't match up. Whether or not the outcome is similar to polarized reflection... dunno.
posted by rlk at 8:32 AM on December 26, 2009

MetaFilter: the results just look like refried shit anyway.

Happy Festivus, everyone
posted by Quietgal at 11:26 AM on December 26, 2009

When I was in high school, I played on the volleyball team, and each year at the end of the season we would get both corny, jokey awards as well as serious/semi-serious awards. For example, I hurt my shoulder and earned the "First Aid" award. There was also this guy named John, who was a starter, and quite a good player -- one of the best on the team. John had a vertical leap that put nearly everyone else to shame, and was by far the strongest player on offense. He also was fairly inconsiderate and rude to most team members. He won the "best offensive player" award, but we also knew that the subtext was that he won the "most offensive player" award as well.

Yesterday I saw a thread that said "the best HDR images on the web" and all I could think of was John, when, in photo after photo, what was actually displayed were "the most HDR images on the web."
posted by chimaera at 11:27 AM on December 26, 2009

Sigh. I can't afford a camera with which to practice HDR.

Instead, I have invented LDR, which requires one to embrace the crapiness of the first generation iPhone camera. I go out at night, point it at a light source, and take a photo that doesn't look real at all.

It's beautiful.
posted by jeffamaphone at 11:41 AM on December 26, 2009 [1 favorite]

I still don't like the photographs in the OP very much. Even with the lighting supplied by HDR, they're still just landscapes. They're not landscapes with very interesting compositions, and if they'd been taken on film and tweaked without the benefit of photoshop and multiple .RAW image files, then they'd be boring images still. They're the kind of thing where if you were the one taking the photo then they would have sentimental value, but nothing really arresting or interesting. About equivalent to what I would expect as output from a first or second year photography student.

But, whereas a photography student may have certain charming imperfections in their work, or maybe have done something interesting at the light table, these all look as flat and banal as screenshots from a video game.

The problem with HDR, in my experience, is that people take really, really boring and cliched shots, get that oversaturated and dreamy HDR look, and then leave it at that. The fact that it looks like a still from Lord of the Rings, or Halo 3, seems to make them believe that they've made something other than another boring landscape. I'm not saying that every photographer has to be groundbreaking and provocative (and if you're just taking pictures to show to the family then who cares), but I've also seen it on community photography boards, where it's just a terrible HDR circle jerk that doesn't let anyone learn anything and ammounts to a lot of back patting over boring (and often terribly done) photos.
posted by codacorolla at 11:55 AM on December 26, 2009

The problem with HDR, in my experience, is that people take really, really boring and cliched shots, get that oversaturated and dreamy HDR look, and then leave it at that.

The problem with HDR is that it's the equivalent of adding lens flares, except for people who think they're talented.
posted by hamida2242 at 12:44 PM on December 26, 2009

I think all the people who use cameras are lazy. What was wrong with the old method of setting up your easel next to a nice landscape and painting every detail over the next six hours?
posted by mccarty.tim at 12:56 PM on December 26, 2009 [3 favorites]

If you notice a technique, it's being used wrong. It's like seeing the dents where a carpenter's hammer missed the nail.
posted by Jimmy Havok at 1:46 PM on December 26, 2009 [2 favorites]

Repeating myself again...

All photographs are fake. Meaning that they are subjective mediated representations of reality that we have imposed an arbitrary cultural documentary burden upon. Photography is a creative medium that's less than 200 years old; doesn't it it seem a bit early for us to declare what is a "real" or a "not real" photograph? Cameras and Photoshop are all part of the same remote-from-reality, culturally influenced, and potentially deceptive device.

I for one am looking forward to the day when photography is able to shed its documentary role just the way painting was able to following the invention of photography. One day our children's grandchildren may be able to look at a photograph and appreciate it for what it is, and not ask "what is that a photograph of?".
posted by squalor at 1:51 PM on December 26, 2009 [3 favorites]

So with the bracketing, you can't just do that by using one RAW image and processing it at different exposure settings in PS? You actually need separate bracketed images?
posted by gottabefunky at 2:05 PM on December 26, 2009

So with the bracketing, you can't just do that by using one RAW image and processing it at different exposure settings in PS? You actually need separate bracketed images?

yep you can do that - sometimes - the hdr on show here is bollocks.

steve smith uses hdr in his work at points.

its handy for getting blacks and the sky in but thats about it.

I'm sure we had this kind of thread before and i blamed overprocessed hdr on prozac users.

I still think that is where most hdr overuse is coming from. perhaps someone should undertake a survey.
posted by sgt.serenity at 2:23 PM on December 26, 2009

"Is anybody doing anything wonderful with HDR and rooms and faces?"

Yes. It's usually called 'lighting'.

popcassady, cute & snarky, but about as correct as claiming that driving a Hummer downhill in neutral is "owning a hybrid"... nothing alike.

HDR is a tool. It can be used to compensate for a lack of (desired) lighting (of course, starting with the proper lighting is preferable, but most of us don't live in a perfect world), or to create artificial effects that lighting can not achieve.
posted by IAmBroom at 3:57 PM on December 26, 2009

HDR is a tool. It can be used to compensate for a lack of (desired) lighting (of course, starting with the proper lighting is preferable, but most of us don't live in a perfect world), or to create artificial effects that lighting can not achieve

Most of us aren't doing anything wonderful with rooms and faces.

I was trying to imply that techniques for managing the dynamic range of an image have been inherent in photography for most of its history. HDR is nothing new.
posted by popcassady at 5:01 PM on December 26, 2009

@ardgedee:

I agree that some of them are over-saturated for my tastes, but certainly not all of them. I don't think there is anything wrong with bumping the saturation up, either.

I don't think any of them are over-sharpened, perhaps higher local contrast where there was already detail.

Sometimes it's not about accurate recording, but trying to express something that you saw when you were standing there. The problem is that it's pretty hard to capture an image just how you saw it when you were there, for many technical reasons. Tweaking certain aspects may give a similar impression.

Either way, none of them scream HDR to me. If you know where to look, you will see it, of course.


@gottabefunky:

RAW images generally offer more range (which is very dependent of the sensor), but still not necessarily enough to capture the whole scene.


@mccarty.tim:

What if your scene changes by the minuet, or second? I wish I had the savant ability to remember exactly what the scene looked like at a particular time.
posted by Soupisgoodfood at 5:02 PM on December 26, 2009

This article doesn't explain the technique or its use very well at all.

Film, paper, sensors and printing media cannot represent the myriad tones that our eyes are able to process - HDR or its analogue predecessor, the zone system, enable the photographer to reduce or increase the tonal contrast to within the limits of these media, providing the finished image with a closer approximation of the important shadow and highlight detail that our eyes can normally resolve when looking at a scene.

There are other techniques that have been used to achieve this (prior to digital photography) - for portraiture in natural light, the use of "fill flash" (that is shooting with a burst of quarter to half power flash) to lift the contrast of the shadows under the brows and chin, providing a better rendering of the subject. There is even a method that utilises secondary exposure or pre-exposure of an image using a grey card to achieve a similar result (although that's a film technique).

Using a neutral density filter, as the author suggests, will not reduce the contrast. It simply reduces the amount of light entering the lens, without affecting the tonality or the contrast of the image. This allows the photographer to use a wider aperture or increase the exposure for other results - I can't see how it is useful otherwise for reducing the tonal range of an image in the field.
posted by a non e mouse at 9:15 PM on December 26, 2009

Sorry, it wasn't supposed to be a practical guide, there are plenty of them. If you know of a particularly good one, though, please post it.

I don't think the zone system is an analogue predecessor to this method. My understanding is that the zone system about how to work within the limits of the media you're using, where as HDR is a way to work around the limits -- at least the capturing part, the rest is tone mapping.

Do you have any info on that last method?

Yes, that looks like a mistake. I think the author was referring to graduated neutral density filters.
posted by Soupisgoodfood at 7:51 AM on December 27, 2009

I don't see a difference, both are trying to capture as much tonal range as possible within the limits of their respective technologies and, trying to find ways around those limitations.

To flash film using a grey card: put a card in front of the lens, making sure that the lens is focused at infinity and, it more than fills the frame. Once you know what the exposure is for the grey card, stop down three* or four stops, take a photo of the blurry card. Then, its just a matter of making a new exposure over the initial one. There's a darkroom technique that uses a similar idea to get the most out of paper by exposing it to low light for a few seconds.

*this technique can be used with slide film too
posted by squeak at 8:45 AM on December 27, 2009

Reading about HDR has made me want to try it. One of the things I like about CCD photography is that the dynamic range is closer to what the eye sees...but it still isn't quite as deep. HDR, well applied, can make up for this.

Of course, there's something to be said for the artistic effect of both film and baseline CCD sensitivity. That's why we still use black & white photography, even though color has been around for more than half a century.
posted by Jimmy Havok at 1:23 PM on December 27, 2009

gottabefunky: “So with the bracketing, you can't just do that by using one RAW image and processing it at different exposure settings in PS? You actually need separate bracketed images?”

You can, but that only gets around the limitations of raw-to-JPEG conversion, it doesn't get around the dynamic range of the sensor itself. You can get much greater range if you shoot the same scene at several different exposures, and then build up your final print from there.

I can't really diss HDR, because I've done the same thing using film. It's not really a new technique. You shoot the same thing a few times, exposing for different areas, and then you dodge and burn them together in the darkroom when you're making the final print. It's precisely the same process that HDR software does, only with chemicals instead of pixels.

If you have a scene with 15 stops of contrast in it between highlights and shadows, but your film is only good for 10 stops, you can shoot two exposures to cover the whole range. But then in the darkroom, you have to decide how to expose those two films onto paper, which might only have 4-6 stops of range, depending on the paper. You do the 'compression' by dodging and burning on the enlarger. I always thought it was unbearably tedious, and only tried it a few times, but I've met people who were fairly good at it. (The real trick is lining up the negatives in the enlarger.)

With a computer to make that 'compression' (the HDR-to-normal conversion) easier, I can see why it's a lot more tempting. Rather than agonize over lighting and exposure in back of the camera, you just shoot a nice big bracket series and go home knowing that, somewhere in the resulting pile of RAW files, is the entire scene that was in front of the lens. You do the hard work in a comfortable chair at home.

Which all makes it more damning that so much HDR stuff is dreadful; there's not much excuse for bad lighting when you effectively have 20-stop "film" and can choose arbitrarily how to translate that down to the output.

I don't think that HDR in general is the photographer's autotune, but Automatix certainly is. By making HDR a "one button" process, it takes the photographer out of one of the most involved parts of photography. I have no problem with HDR in general, but the Automatix "look" is pretty awful.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:59 PM on December 27, 2009

Most of the godawful "HDR" photography seen around the web is more the result of the tonemapping process rather than "HDR" per se. High Dynamic Range is really just collecting additional image data - its what people then do with the resulting 32 bit floating point image that makes people throw up in their mouths. HDR actually started in the 3d graphics industry (where I make my money) and is still used today to supply lighting data for 3d scenes. It is really fantastic in that it is able to capture the real-world lighting conditions of an environment.

Then...it found its way into photography. All that awful, awful stuff floating around the interwebs is usually poorly tonemapped hdr images. People for some reason deciding that they want the shadow values in their images to be lifted to match areas of the image that are...in reality...multiple times brighter.

Proper use of a graduated ND filter on a camera will make sure that you almost never need to create an HDR exposure for most images you want to capture - I still don't understand the appeal. A faster way of doing it without an ND filter is to simply bracket or take 2 snaps...one exposed for sky...one exposed for shadows...blend in photoshop. Subtle processing of an HDR can yield the same effect...its just when people go nuts with it...good lord.

Cameras are already moving towards HDR capture with one click...which is the future of RAW. This will be an asset.
posted by jnnla at 10:44 PM on December 27, 2009

Cameras are already moving towards HDR capture with one click...which is the future of RAW. This will be an asset.

I was just thinking that. Surely, the camera can poll the sensor a few times while the shutter is open, and then do the HDR post-processing for you. It could probably even tell you if a lot of objects are moving in your frame.
posted by esprit de l'escalier at 12:29 AM on December 28, 2009

Gradated! Not graduated.
posted by a non e mouse at 12:53 AM on December 28, 2009

Additionally, gradated ND filters are for lowering the differential between sky and foreground contrast - in a truly haphazard fashion - if you have anything other than a flat horizon, they're useless.

You might be thinking of a polarising filter - but even so, that just reduces angled light reflection to provide a clearer rendering of the surface (sky) to reduce contrast.
posted by a non e mouse at 12:59 AM on December 28, 2009

@Kadin2048: Yeah, digital has made many processes so much easier. I got into photography in the digital age and have only played with film a little bit (medium format pinhole cameras). Reading about all the old darkroom techniques, as interesting and admirable as they can be, makes me glade to have digital.

@ a non e mouse: Google seems to think graduated is the correct word. If you read the article, it makes the point about being limited to flat horizons. Polarising filters can be used to increase contrast, too.
posted by Soupisgoodfood at 2:06 AM on December 28, 2009

Google/Wikipedia are (believe it or not) occasionally wrong.

Gradated = to pass by gradual or imperceptible degrees, as one colour into another.

But that was what my lecturer used to drum into me. Maybe he was wrong.
posted by a non e mouse at 2:22 AM on December 28, 2009

Let's not confuse the real issue here. HDR is a tool. What people are really rejecting here is a style - one that heavily uses HDR to achieve a certain look.

And three years ago, when HDR first emerged as a new way of editing photos, that style was incredible! Photos that look "overbaked" today looked incredible back then. And for that reason, I think many of these early HDR photos are artistically significant - they opened up a new an fanciful reality for photography that did not readily exist prior to that.

But like all styles and trends, they live their time and then die. HDR let's you do all kinds of things to a photo, including overbake it. It's just that overbaking is dated and as artists it's time to move on.
posted by fremen at 8:20 AM on December 28, 2009

"Graduated means increasing by regular amounts or grades." Tiffen, Lee, Kodak, B+W, Marumi, all seem to agree, too. :) Both seem technically correct, but graduated seems to be the standard. I understand how a lecturer could make that particular mistake, though -- graduated is something that happens to his students.
posted by Soupisgoodfood at 1:12 PM on December 28, 2009

Not all of them... (graduate, that is)

I was so sure that it was gradated, however on checking Langford, he uses graduated also.

You live and learn.
posted by a non e mouse at 7:32 PM on December 28, 2009