timeimmortal

Once again, I’m kind of jumping back and forth in time, although this time only by a matter of hours (if that much). This picture is the ferry terminal at Horseshoe Bay, taken perhaps thirty minutes before the ferry departed for Vancouver Island.

The reason this image took a bit longer to arrive is that it is an attempt at a high dynamic range (or simply HDR) image. The concept behind HDR is basically to present an image in which both a darker foreground and a brighter background are in detail, with neither of the two being either washed out and overexposed, or dark and underexposed.

In layman’s terms, I suppose you could say that what HDR is is an attempt to make the camera see what the human eye sees when looking at a scene.

The plain fact of the matter is that the dynamic range (the “space” between the darkest value that a camera can record and the brightest value it can record) of most cameras is substantially less than that of the human eye.

So whereas we might look at a scene with our eyes and see a bright Sun in a blue sky behind a tree on which we can see the colour of the branches and the leaves, in a photo of same we will either see the detail on the tree in front of a washed out, bright white sky, or else we will see the Sun in a blue sky behind a dark, essentially black tree.

HDR photography uses one or more of several techniques to get around this limitation. Some forms of HDR attempt to use bracketing to combine several images, each at a different exposure level, into one cohesive picture that looks “right”. Other workarounds include the use of neutral density filters of proper magnitude at appropriate angles. Lacking both good HDR software and a graduated neutral density filter, I opt for a third method: taking a mid-tone picture and using Lightroom’s surprisingly power curves tool to effectively create a pseudo-HDR image.

Edit-wise, I began by doing a lot of highlight reduction on this shot, using both Lightroom’s built-in Recovery tool and the Tone Curve tool as well; almost all the bright highlights were stripped out of the picture. This was enough to restore detail not only to the sky, but to the clouds as well (note the subtle gradiations of grey amidst the white). I also used the Fill Light tool in Lightroom, which brightens darker tones, and then darkened some of the shadows again to restore contrast detail.

Finally, I applied my calibration/Punch preset, some noise reduction (always a good idea after that many level adjustments), and a bit of chromatic aberration correction to round out the edits. I toyed with the Clarity a bit, and thought briefly about doing this shot “diffusion print” style, but instead settled on a Clarity value of 50 (the default for the Punch preset).

This was a shot that I honestly didn’t think would work out; my past experiments with HDR have only occasionally ended successfully. That said, I was pleasantly surprised with how well this picture did turn out, and I’m going to have to remember everything I did that made this one turn out right, because I know I’ll want to do it again.