How to do HDR?

System

I have elements 6. What is HDR and how do I do it? Try to give me the KISS version on this as I am a new to using PP.

jfriend

captain78 wrote:

I have elements 6. What is HDR and how do I do it? Try to give me the KISS version on this as I am a new to using PP.

The general idea for HDR is that there are some images that have too large a range between their brights and darks to be properly recorded by today's digital cameras. There may also be images where detail is very important to the scene in both the very bright parts of the image and the very dark parts of the image and most means of recording and displaying those images won't be able to display all that detail.

So, the idea behind HDR is to take tonal information from several different exposures (two or more) that captures more detail in the shadows and more detail in the highlights and shift and combine that tonal information with something called tone mapping so that a normal display can then see more detail in both shadows and highlights.

A few references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging
http://www.flickr.com/groups/hdr/discuss/40580/
http://www.outbackphoto.com/workflow/wf_a106/essay.html
http://qandablog.typepad.com/questions_and_answers/2007/04/photo_of_the_da_1.html

I don't think elements 6 has HDR features. You may be able to do some manual tone mixing in elements 6, but thgat would involve combining multiple exposures with masks that you create. There are specialized programs that can create HDR images like Photomatrix and the full Photoshop CS3.

badtz

If your current post processing program doesn't have hdr functionality you can try http://www.hdrsoft.com/ , there is also a good tutorial on it http://photocamel.com/forum/hdr-photography/28455-hdr-tutorial.html (sorry to link to another forum, its just one of the better photomatix tutorials out there I've seen)