Adobe Photoshop CC For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 20

Ten Things to Know about HDR

The world of photography continues to evolve at an amazing pace! Not only has digital photography replaced film for just about all uses, the various Raw file formats are more and more common in both professional and high-end hobbyist photography, and even a number of smartphones. A typical camera phone now captures as many or more pixels than did an expensive pocket camera just a few years ago. Smartphones that offer an HDR option can help in some challenging lighting conditions, such as a photo of a dark room with the bright outdoors in the windows. But the smartphone’s HDR option doesn’t hold a candle to the high dynamic range images you can produce with a good camera and Photoshop’s Merge to HDR Pro.

I begin this chapter with an explanation of high dynamic range photography, give you some pointers for capturing the images that you’ll use in an HDR image, and then explain how you actually combine and use HDR photos.

Understanding HDR

HDR stands for high dynamic range. The dynamic range is the visual “distance” from black to white. By making that visual distance greater, you create a wider tonal range in the image. The world we see around us contains far more range than can be reproduced on a monitor, printed to paper, or even saved in a 16-bit image. (See Chapter 6 for an explanation of 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit color.)

Consider, for example, shooting an image in a room with windows on a sunny day. If you expose your image for the content ...