Higher dynamic range
2007-09-11 16:03:11.99207+00 by
Dan Lyke
2 comments
How to give your low-end Canon digital camera RAW support (source). And I'm not connecting to their servers right now, but in the "what do I do with that RAW file once I get it?" department, Phil showed me the software from http://www.hdrsoft.com/ . They've got a one-click and it does all the contrast adjustment and such to give you a pretty reasonable lower dynamic range of a high dynamic range image (and they do it from a single or multiple images, so if you're autobracketing RAW files by two stops you should be able to do amazing things), it's good enough to be worth booting into Windows for.
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#Comment Re: made: 2007-09-12 00:21:07.8599+00 by:
jeff
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I will definitely download a copy of Photomatix and check it out, Dan. Thanks for the post! And send my thanks to Phil for passing it along!
Jeff
#Comment Re: made: 2007-09-13 09:29:07.110819+00 by:
DaveP
A warning: Photomatix makes it very easy to make "artistic" or "fake looking" images. Take a gander at the
HDR Group on Flickr.
That's not to say that it's bad software, just that people seem to find it easy to produce garish results with
it.
My experiments with HDR tend to produce
more restrained results, getting more so as I play with HDR more, but yeah, bracketing in raw is
something I do whenever I know I've got challenging exposures I might want to play with in HDR mode.
But even without HDR, raw is worth shooting. I can "miss" the exposure by two (or more) stops and still fix
the photo in the raw conversion. I still try to get the exposure right, but I worry less when I screw up in
telling the camera what I'm trying to do because I know I can fix it later.