HDR and RAW

So, you know when you look at photos and they look really spectacular but in a way not real? Well it's true, there is a trick. There is two actually. The first one is called HDR or "High Dynamic Range" Imaging. Now this is quite clever, I like it, and I don't think that it's cheating. Using the AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing) feature of your camera, it is possible to take 3 photos. One over exposed, one under exposed, and one thats just right. These can be combined in a way that will allow the photo to represent a lot more realistically what the scene would look like. There is some software called "Photomatix" that will do this for you quite simply. It also has an "Auto Align" feature so that you don't have to have a tripod to take a HDR photo. This photo is a HDR photo of the park.

Here is a link of how to set the Canon EOD 350D up for HDR photos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbSGE4nTXeU

You can really achieve some very nice results, quite simply using this technique. The other technique (which is often an integral feature of HDR processing) is Tone Mapping. Now Tone Mapping defiantly is cheating! It involves taking some colours are replacing them with different ones. You can use this to produce mad effects, but you can also use it to breath a new life into photos.

It is handy for increasing the vibrancy of what may otherwise be a quite dull photo (handy for people who live in Manchester where the light is crap all the time) but it can also be used to stun and audience, taking a ready existing beautiful photo and making it awesome.

Another option is to take RAW images, and then process them. I have used Adobe Lightroom in this photo. Here is a comparison of what a normal image looks like (left) compared with (the right) the processed one.

Here is a processed RAW image.