HDR photos: What’s the difference?

HDR photos: What’s the difference?

May 05

HDR or High Dynamic Range photos look great! But, is this any significant? Yes!
For those who don’t know much about HDR photos: they are photos that have a bigger range, so they can capture from dark, shadow areas till bright, sunny areas.
With nowadays cameras, we already have a nice range, but HDR provide a much bigger range. Photos will appear much real and more natural, enabling us to see more details and more “visible” areas.
Here are some example I took in my weekend at Gerês – beautiful region on the top of Portugal – and Guimarães:

Today, there aren’t much HDR cameras, so the alternative is to just take several pictures with different exposure times and use them to compose a HDR picture.
You can use Photoshop, FDRTools or – my favorite – photomatix. Some cameras like Canon already have a AEB automation so you just define the intervals of the exposers (eg. -2, 0 and 2 of exposer).You can see a lot of HDR pictures over the web, like the:
Portugal Vivo em HDR group on flickr.
But it is rare to see nice photos that show you the “normal” photo and the HDR version.So, here is a collection of photos in their normal state (as capture by the camera) and their post-processed HDR result. I think this is the easiest way to understand the benefits of HDR and why it is so important.

Normal Version	HDR Version
This is the normal version, that the camera usually takes.	This version is built with the image on the left and two more similar images, one with less exposer and the other with more.

The all set “HDR Difference!” is full with examples.