Flutterby™! : Higher dynamic range

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Higher dynamic range

2007-09-11 16:03:11.99207+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

How to give your low-end Canon digital camera RAW support (source). And I'm not connecting to their servers right now, but in the "what do I do with that RAW file once I get it?" department, Phil showed me the software from http://www.hdrsoft.com/ . They've got a one-click and it does all the contrast adjustment and such to give you a pretty reasonable lower dynamic range of a high dynamic range image (and they do it from a single or multiple images, so if you're autobracketing RAW files by two stops you should be able to do amazing things), it's good enough to be worth booting into Windows for.

[ related topics: Photography Microsoft ]

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#Comment Re: made: 2007-09-12 00:21:07.8599+00 by: jeff [edit history]

I will definitely download a copy of Photomatix and check it out, Dan. Thanks for the post! And send my thanks to Phil for passing it along!

Jeff

#Comment Re: made: 2007-09-13 09:29:07.110819+00 by: DaveP

A warning: Photomatix makes it very easy to make "artistic" or "fake looking" images. Take a gander at the HDR Group on Flickr.

That's not to say that it's bad software, just that people seem to find it easy to produce garish results with it.

My experiments with HDR tend to produce more restrained results, getting more so as I play with HDR more, but yeah, bracketing in raw is something I do whenever I know I've got challenging exposures I might want to play with in HDR mode.

But even without HDR, raw is worth shooting. I can "miss" the exposure by two (or more) stops and still fix the photo in the raw conversion. I still try to get the exposure right, but I worry less when I screw up in telling the camera what I'm trying to do because I know I can fix it later.