As an example, this photo, which is not really all that special, IMO, but folks seemed to be wowed by it and all I can gather is it is the drama supposedly added by the HDR. But I look at so many of these HDR photos and they just scream “HDR” and their hyper-realism is almost jarring to me.
Don’t get me wrong, HDR produces some amazing pictures, but it seems to be what everybody is doing thinking it takes ordinary photos and makes them amazing or something.
That one is slightly overdone. But in general, HDR photos come the closest to capturing what its actually like to see scenes like that in person. I like them, but it is certainly possible to go overboard and end up with a photo that is over saturated and cartoonish. The one you linked to would look better if it were turned down by about 15-20%. It certainly is a vast improvement on what an ordinary exposure of that scene would look like.
I think there’s a place for it and sometimes gets a little tiring but yeah, it does really wow the masses. I take HDR from time to time and sometimes I shoot for realism and sometimes (similar to the linked photo) I go for surrealism. I completely understand that these shots don’t look anywhere close to real, but I wasn’t really going for “real”, I was going for something I found aesthetically pleasing.
The purists often criticize the practice in that HDR is supposed to be used to make a more realistic photo. I just contend that that is one of its purposes but it can also be used to create an intriguing picture, realistic or not.
That’s actually one of the more tasteful versions of HDR that I’ve seen. It’s this kind of overdone crap that bugs the shit out of me. I wouldn’t even call the one in the OP’s link overdone. It looks pretty good to me as far as the HDR goes, but compositionally a bit weak.
Done correctly, there’s nothing wrong with it. Look at how aggressively Ansel Adams would dodge and burn his images to eke out every last bit of detail. This is what good HDR attempts to do. (Well, a good standard use of HDR. HDR can also be used aggressively and stylistically, like in portraits, for instance. It can look gimmicky, but not all of it does.)
Pulykamell pretty much summed up my thoughts. The image in the OP isn’t too bad - maybe because the setting sort of fits the technique. I have seen much, much worse.
I used to shoot a lot of home interiors in HDR. It takes a lot of practice, and even more restraint, to create a suitable image. I look at my early attempts (which I thought at the time were quite special) and smack my forehead while exclaiming, “oh, vey”.
My advice for beginners: make your HDR. Then dial it back about 50%.
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What’s interesting is how few recreational photographers do not crop, when it is easily the best and in fact easiest tool to improve the composition, focus and drama of a picture. Folks love to use all sorts of filters and smudging and sharpening and filling and never touch the crop tool.
I don’t consider myself an expert photographer by any means and one of the first things I do is crop. I’ve also never done HDR. But I think the popularity of things like Instagram make people think that you have to use some kind of filter or adjustment to photos in order to make them “artistic”.
As an aside, the guidelines for using acronyms is to give the full words for the first instance, then the acronym in brackets after it so people will know what you’re talking about without having to go google it. For the rest of the people like me, HDR is High Dynamic Range imaging, a set of methods used in image processing.
Yeah, those are tasteful, but I don’t think those are necessarily true HDR. Looks more like localized tonal manipulation going on, with a bit of color work and strong sharpening or high-pass filter. The reason I say that is it doesn’t seem like the subjects are in a high dynamic range lighting situation that would suggest the use of HDR photography to bring all the tones into the picture. It is possible that he took exposure separately for shadow detail and highlight detail, but it doesn’t look like it would be necessary to create those pictures.
I should be more clea I don’t think the photo I linked to is bad HDR, like some have posted, I just think out is am ordinary picture that folks think is “great” because of the HDR. I think the Instagram comparison is appropriate in some ways.
Awful faux-HDR has long been the opium of the Flickr crowd (even I am not immune). In fact it pops up on the Stages of a Photographer chart, as the HDR hole. Done well it’s seamless; done stylishly it’s stunning; but like most things in life it’s more often done badly and without taste. Here’s a good example of a photo that benefits from the HDR treatment - the subject lends itself to HDR, the processing is tasteful, and it looks nice.
But it’s worth pointing out that a lot of the HDR out there isn’t actually HDR at all, it’s tone-mapping. Instead of layering several different exposures, the photographers just take a single photograph and run it through some software like Luminance HDR. This generally boosts the shadows and tames the highlights - there’s a terrible example here, where you can see how the software has tried to equalise the exposure. You can do something similar with the shadow and highlight sliders in Photoshop.
Tonemapping a single image is a lot easier than layering multiple exposures and can also produce tasteful images; it’s a lot like dodging and burning, but automated, and on a more granular level. As Pulpy Camel pointed out, in the past photographers spent ages in the field with graduated filters and ages in the darkroom dodging and burning to achieve a similar effect. The time investment was so huge that photographers made damn sure they got it right. But most people can’t be bothered, so they slide sliders.
Well, Google didn’t really help me out - what’s “one exposure per motive”? From one site I got the impression it meant to set things up, take one shot and that’s it.
