HDR. It’s something that gets bandied around all over the place. You can hardly get away from it. For those who don’t know, it stands for ‘high dynamic range.’
You know what happens when a new toy comes along, it usually gets misused. Like nuclear fission. Well actually, apart from the atom bombs in 1945 nuclear fission has been used for useful purposes such as power generation for a long time. Useful apart from the meltdowns that is. So has nuclear fusion, but the hydrogen bomb is a seriously questionable toy.
What is it about the human makeup which makes it use stuff wrongly? You know what I mean. Like trying to turn a screw with a penknife. Or driving flat out up to a red traffic light. Or making everything that possibly can be out of plastic. Or making factory fishing ships that can lay waste to vast tracts of ocean in hours, just because it’s possible. Why does the pendulum always have to swing so stupidly far?
When looking at photography, dynamic range is the recordable range between the brightest highlight and the densest shadow. Every film has its own specific ability to record detail in the shadows before it just blocks in to a black (clear negative) while maintaining detail in the highlights before it burns out (solid black negative), depending on the way it is developed. Exactly the same applies to electronic image capture. And the nearer one gets to its limitation, the poorer the presentation.
Then some bright spark invented HDR (digital) processing. Very clever. It still has its limitations but they are different. By making separate highlight and shadow exposures and, using the appropriate software, blending them with the normally acceptable exposure for the subject, you can effectively broaden the native dynamic range. I say “effectively” because you are not really broadening it, more moving the extremities away from the extremes, giving an impression of a much broader range.
But like any new toy (it’s not that new anymore!) it is being used for everything, and not only overused but over processed when it is. A bit like the numpty in Croydon High Street on a Friday night in his Subaru Impreza demonstrating to everyone within a one mile radius that he’s just bought a sub-bass loudspeaker complete with its dedicated power amplifier. The fact that you (and he) can hear the body panels vibrating more than the music itself appears not to worry the little twit. What matters to him is the fact that it is used to its maximum capability regardless of anything including wobbly panels.
There are many interpretations of HDR, but they all have a similar ‘look’ about them. What they ‘look’ like is that someone has pressed the HDR button. Uuugh. Have a look in any estate agent’s window. You’ll see what I mean. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that loads of shadow and highlight detail isn’t a good idea. It’s a really great idea … but the way I do it. I know, really pretentious. Sorry. Anyway, it takes hours and hours to accomplish.
I make the same full range exposures in order to get the data I need. Let’s say it’s a photograph of a car. Then I manually blend together ‘only’ the relevant elements of the various exposures and then process all the parts of the car individually. Every panel, one by one. The windscreen wipers. Each glass panel individually. Down to the last screw sometimes, if they show. The tyres, one by one. The hub caps one by one … you get the idea. It goes on for ever. Then I go over the whole car and remove any detail I would not have included if I was painting a water colour of it. Loads of stuff.
The end result is a photograph of a car with a very large range of tones indeed, impossible to obtain with a single exposure, but which does not look like an HDR image. Happy days. The beauty of this is that very few people can be bothered … so enter stage right – the norm’ … HDR … all over the option.
The question is this. Is it important to you?