2026-07-11 Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Digital Photography

   Our local library has an annual book sale. I am known in the area as a person interested in photography. I was told the library had had a donation of photography books. It was agreed the books would be offered for sale and any remaining books would be passed on to me to pass on to our historical photography society.
   Days after the sale I was given a box holding 19 books/magazines and one video. The first of the books I read is the Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Digital Photography by Ferrell McCollough. It is a Lark Photography Book published in 2008.
   High Dynamic photos are made by taking from two to five images of the same scene. The images are exposed at 1-3 EV stops apart—usually at the same shutter speed, unless time exposures are required—so a much broader range of tones can be captured than the digital camera’s single exposure six stop range.
   Capturing a huge brightness range in a single image requires a second step. The range is way too broad to display on a monitor or to print, so the image has to be tone mapped. All this sounds pretty straight forward, but there are many small details that have to be considered.
   For starters specific HDR software is required. The choices include Photomatrix Pro, FDRTools, Dynamic Photo HDR and Artizen HDR. Adobe Photoshop has HDR tools in their more recent versions. In a really intricate chapter trying to do a HDR panoramic image that requires stitching separate shots together can be played three ways, depending on the order of the three steps (stitch, merge and tone map). You could also be using five separate images. It isn’t mentioned, but at some point I would expect the computer would be tied up for quite awhile!
   The book is filled with colour images. Some of the sections conclude with guest portfolios. Various really tricky areas of photography are explored including interior architectural shooting (with one light!) as well as flash photography (with one light!) of still life subjects.
   All-in-all this is a great book.

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