The Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux

Posted Mar 14, 2007 18:54 UTC (Wed) by kolloid (guest, #25282)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux

Sorry, but I hate HDR images. They're so artificially looking. Like a bad screenshots from 3D game.

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux

Posted Mar 14, 2007 19:58 UTC (Wed) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (1 responses)

Many HDR images look stupid, but that is true of nearly any photograph. HDR is a good tool in the hands of a good photographer.

Randomly selected example:

http://flickr.com/photos/darrenstone/419760365/

The Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux

Posted Mar 15, 2007 5:13 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Hmm, I think even that one goes a bit over the taste line for me. There's something about the wide angle composition and bright flat cloud line that says "texture mapped" about the clouds to me.

I think it will take a while for people to establish a taste baseline in HDR. I really like the results my friend Dan produces, but they're not at all consistent. That is, he uses HDR in different ways for different purposes at different times. They're sometimes quite manipulated, and sometimes quite naturalistic, but I never get that "what videogame is this from" feeling.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux

Posted Mar 14, 2007 20:40 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (2 responses)

Sorry, but I hate HDR images. They're so artificially looking.

They are somewhat artificial, but ordinary photographs are also a poor representation of the physical world. It's just that we've been looking at them for so long that they seem normal.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux

Posted Mar 14, 2007 23:18 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] (1 responses)

That's exactly correct. HDR has the potential (and this is why I want to try it) to enable the output to resemble what the human eye sees in a scene, since it has a far greater contrast ratio than any camera. But as you said, people tend to not notice this, and prefer photos which are comfortably within the limitations of the popular cameras of the day.

Pro photographers have been doing this sort of manipulation for years--it's called dodging and burning. Ansel Adams was an expert at it; that's why his images look so dramatic (and "artificial", sometimes, as the poster said above) because he intentionally tried to make the print look as *he saw* the scene, rather than what the camera captured. I love his famous line about the negative being the "orchestral score" of the photograph, and the print being the actual "live performance"--one comes from the other, but the life is breathed into the score by the performing artist. (Adams was also a trained classical pianist, btw.) So it is with the negative and the print; the camera's action of capturing light and affecting film or sensor is only the beginning of the piece of art, not the end. I get the feeling that Adams would have just adored the tools we have these days--so much easier than all that nasty mucking about with chemicals in the darkroom. :)

The Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux

Posted Mar 15, 2007 14:48 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

Pro photographers have been doing this sort of manipulation for years--it's called dodging and burning.

I've done a lot of that! Unlike our editor, I had a 5-year career in the photo industry before I made it to engineering school.

In some cases it is similar to HDR, but it's tricky because everything happens in realtime, and it's hard to get the same results on multiple exposures.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux

Posted Mar 15, 2007 13:19 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

I agree with you, for most of the HDR stuff. I was quite amazed when I first saw it, but that wore off quickly. I think that, when applied in a way that you don't immediately think "this was done with HDR", it can be very effective: in the same way you don't notice the best CGI.