HDR stands for ‘high dynamic range’, a style of image processing that’s become both popular and notorious. It’s a technique that’s used to capture scenes with a very high brightness range and employs various tools to bring the brightest and darkest parts close enough together that they can both be seen in a single viewable image.
There are two parts to this. The first is capturing a series of exposures (or even a single exposure, maybe with a RAW file) that captures the full range of tones on the scene.
The second part is using ‘tonemapping’ or HDR software to manipulate the very brightest and darkest areas so that the details in both become clearly visible.
Some photographers try to make HDR images look as natural and ‘unmanipulated’ as possible. Others revel in the hyper-real colours, contrast and detail afforded by some of the more outlandish HDR tools out there.
Nik Software HDR Efex Pro 2 is now part of the Google Nik Collection, but the software itself is unchanged – it remains one of the most approachable and most effective HDR tools you can get. But while the bundled … Continue reading Learn how to use HDR Efex Pro 2 presets
There are so many filters in Color Efex Pro that it can take a long, long time to work out all the things that it can do. Some of the tools are obvious, like Levels and Curves or Graduated Filters, … Continue reading Get an HDR effect from a single image in Color Efex Pro
Capture One Pro 7 is not just an excellent RAW converter. Like Adobe Lightroom it has some quite sophisticated adjustment controls. In particular, the Capture One High Dynamic Range sliders are very good at extracting the maximum latent highlight and … Continue reading How to get the most from the Capture One High Dynamic Range controls
