Handling Extreme Light with Dynamic Range Increase

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.tofahrn-foto.de/index.php?lg=en&pg=tipps.dri' target='_blank'>http://www.tofahrn-foto.de/index.php?lg=en&pg=tipps.dri</a><br /><br /></div><i>"In most situations you can't choose your light, and have to use what's available. Situations with extreme differences in light-intensity are a little problematic even for modern digital cameras. Most digital cameras have a lower dynamic range than analog film, and both won't even get close to the range of the human eye. Especially night shots are sometimes difficult to handle. With several different exposures of the same scenario, you can handle that problem with a procedure called DRI ("Dynamic Range Increase"). There are a several DRI-guides available in the net, one of them will be found below."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Ex21156DRI.jpg" /><br /><br />Oh wow, I wish I had found this sooner. I am going to have to bookmark this permanently because situations with extremely differing lighting conditions present themselves quite often and I almost always simply went with the decreasing the shutter speed option. With DRI (Dynamic Range Increase), I think I might be able to take some awesome shots.

[Doug Johnson]

Photoshop CS2 has a feature to automatically do this procedure. Look for "HDR" or "High Dynamic Range" in the help.

In situations where the extremes aren't quite as bad as some of the samples, just switching to .RAW format on your camera can help quite a bit. You can then use Photoshop or your camera's .RAW conversion software to create images at different exposure levels from the raw data, and then use the procedure described above or the HDR feature in Photoshop to merge back into a single image again. This same procedure works on pictures you have already taken in .RAW that were under- or overexposed and thought may have been a total loss!

[jizmo]

Photoshop CS2 has a feature to automatically do this procedure. Look for "HDR" or "High Dynamic Range" in the help.
What does it actually do? Automatically combine the images like shown here?

I've been enhancing the dynamic range in Photoshop for years, but never with more than two photos.