Digital Photography: What's New & Exciting Right Now? (Part 2 of 3)

3. High Dynamic Range (HDR)

One of the most difficult problems to solve in digital photography occurs when you have very different light in different parts of your photograph.

For example, a sunrise or sunset, a dark room that includes a window with bright light coming in (especially if there is a captivating view out the window), interesting bright clouds with a dark landscape, or any dark foreground framing a bright background.

The problem in these situations is that either you blow out the bright areas (they're all white), or you get no details in the dark areas (they're all black). Sometimes that's the effect. But if not, it's been almost impossible to get detail in both the light and dark areas.

In fact, when Jim and I went to a photography workshop last fall, we wanted to photograph a beautiful sunrise along with the autumn leaves. In this specific situation, the leader of the workshop said it wasn't even worth trying -- it couldn't be done.

However, it can be done (and fortunately, we didn't listen and tried anyway). ;-)

You can now use specialized HDR software combining several similar photographs with different exposures. It works by combining three or more almost-identical images of the same scene: one with the dark areas properly exposed, another with the light areas properly exposed, and the third with the mid-tones properly exposed (which is probably the photo you'd normally take).

This software (for example, Photomatix, Bracketeer or a plug-in for Photoshop CS3), lets you combine the useful parts of each photo. It creates a composite to give you the best of all worlds (and even gives you some control of how to combine them).

You can see examples of photographs that were created using HDR here -- some are quite impressive.

What this means for you: Whereas this is fairly specialized today, in the future, we predict that cameras and editing software will have HDR built in so the camera can automatically take several photos and properly bracket your images to then automatically combine the best parts of each, giving you a compelling photograph of the sunrise, sunset, dark room, clouds, etc.

That's exciting!

Tomorrow, in Part 3 of this series, we'll talk about the final two exciting trends: Smart Focusing and Photo Sharing. See you then...