Bring your photos to life

You’ve probably already seen high dynamic range (HDR) photographs, even if you didn’t know it at the time. They’re hyper-realistic images created by combining several shots of the same scene and extracting different levels of detail from each of them.

With subtle processing, an HDR image might look striking without appearing artificial, but with heavier processing it is possible to create surrealistic and even psychedelic results.

For an idea of what’s possible, take a look at the HDR pool on Flickr where there are thousands of examples. If you fancy having a go yourself, this Masterclass tells you all you need to know.

The basics of HDR
Most digital images are stored in JPEG format and viewed on a computer monitor or printed by an inkjet printer.

Because of the limitations of these devices, the fact that a JPEG image can store ‘only’ 16 million colours is not too much of a problem, but when most digital cameras are able to capture 64 billion colours, a JPEG file is always a compromise embodying just a fraction of the colours that were actually present at the time of taking a shot.

High dynamic range images are created by combining several shots of the same scene, thus increasing the number of colours available. Once an HDR image has been processed, it is stored with an .exr extension, from which low-resolution versions in JPEG, TIFF and other formats can be produced for display.

Surprisingly, given the sophistication of the technique, very little in the way of special equipment and software is needed. All but the cheapest digital cameras can take pictures suitable for HDR manipulation and the software needn’t cost you a penny.

For example, the processing software used for this Masterclass is called Qtpfsgui and can be downloaded free of charge from www.s nipurl.com/72se5.

Qtpfsgui is a bit of a mouthful, so in this feature we’ll simply call it Q. Download both the Windows set-up file and the Windows DLL zip file, and after installing the program be sure to extract the DLL package into the same folder as the program.