Review Western Idaho Fair Competition
This month's September assignment "HDR"
Presentation by Dylan MacMaster
For those that have never used it, HDR can be an intimidating acronym. Next add the fact that to process your images with HDR you need special software. And then there are some who believe that the true art of photography should happen at the time of capture and that post processing is a form of cheating. People who say, “Oh, that’s photoshopped”. Purists can say what they want, but “today the fact remains that if you do not use the techniques and processing skills that everyone else uses, you will be left behind.“ This quote isn’t by a world famous photographer, but rather an amateur photographer who has learned to embrace “photoshopping”, not as a crutch to fix a bad capture, but as a tool to enhance a great photograph and take it to the next level.
Dylan first started utilizing HDR in his photo processing of
his landscape photographs about 3 years ago and generally he attempts to shy
away from the unrealistic tell-tale “painterly” HDR images. His goal is
to increase the dynamic range, keeping details in shadows and highlights, while
still maintaining the sense of realism within the image. But there are
also times when going beyond realism can yield nice results as well.
Using Photomatix and Photoshop software, he will show a few examples of his
various HDR workflows.
The photo is an HDR composite of 4 captures across a
6-stop range to enable detail in the fence while still keeping the rising sun
from blowing out the horizon.
Then there are times when using the HDR process to create
more of an artistic representation of an image can yield a very pleasing
image. This is an example of a single RAW file processed through HDR to
create a result that looks more like a hyperrealism painting.
