High Dynamic Range (HDR) Picture

Panasonic Lumix LX3, Autobracket On, F 2.8, Multiple Shutter Speed, Taman Meru Indah 12-4-2009

Yesterday, I went to the motorcycle workshop to replace my motorcycle tire tube. While waiting for the mechanic to finish his job, I just remembered that my camera is in the motorcycle box. Without any delays, I pick the camera and tried to find something interesting to photograph. After a while snapping pictures of the workshop, I just remembered that my Panasonic Lumix LX3 has the Autobraket capability and it made me thinking about High Dynamic Range photograph. Each of above images is a combination of three pictures. Processing was made to adjust the tone of the picture so that it will posses high medium and low tone which enable human eyes to see wide range of colors and details in the picture. Camera lens is not as perfect as human eyes due to its limited capability to capture wide range of color spectra. Human eyes posses tremendous capability to translate high contrast and high range of color. This is why most of the time; our eyes manage to capture details in shaded areas whereas camera lenses will translate the shaded area as black. Thus, for a photographer to capture shaded area, frequently they will try their best not to include highly lid area so that the lid area will not overexpose. Most landscape photographers will use graduated filter in order to capture bright area with shaded are. With the advancement of digital photography, combining more than two pictures is possible. High Dynamic Range picture is popular in term of digital manipulation of photograph to cater the problem between the highly lid area and shaded area. The most frequent technique used in order to create HDR images is by capturing picture using 3 range of exposures; normal exposed picture, underexposed picture and overexposed picture. By using the combination of the three pictures, the raw digital data will possess the information for all possible ranges of color in different brightness. Tone mapping is done to the combined picture to repair the contrast, saturation and other parameter for the pictures.