Digital cameras don’t come close to recording the dynamic range that the human eye does. High dynamic range (HDR) images allow photographers to record a much greater range of tonal detail. Photographer Sean McHugh explores HDR and wonderful and creative possibilities that HDR offers photographers. Lighting situations once avoided now take on an entirely new set of possibilities primarily due to new “merge to HDR” feature in Photoshop CS2. Merge to HDR allows the user to merge a series of bracketed exposures into a single image which spans the tonal range detail of the entire series.
As digital sensors attain progressively higher resolutions, and thereby successively smaller pixel sizes, the one quality of an image which does not benefit is its dynamic range. This is particularly apparent in compact cameras with resolutions near 8 megapixels, as these are more susceptible than ever to blow highlights or noisy shadow detail. Further, some scenes simply contain a greater brightness range than can be captured by current digital cameras– of any type.
