Can HDR Software Finally Produce High Dynamic Range?

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• Nice , I LOVE YOU

• +Jeff Sullivan, interesting that you mention the improvements in software.  I was just having a conversation with several other G+ers about deleting photos or not.  I tend to not delete anything unless I know it is horrible beyond use and that I'll never use it.  I mentioned that there's no telling what software improvements will allow us to do with RAW files 10 or 15 years from now.  Your post is a perfect example of this.

• You've seen my comment on the original share of this photo +Jeff Sullivan ;)

• Those are good examples of how to do HDR well. Basically the halos have to be eliminated.

• +Nick Clarke That is exactly the development which is luring me back to using it again.  Five years ago, Tone Mapping created halos and other artifacts which were typically very, very hard to mask, so most photos created using HDR software seemed to scream "HDR!" louder than the supposed subject of the photo.  When that's the case, does the subject of the photo really matter at all?  Every photo says exactly the same repetitive, and eventually boring, message: "HDR!  HDR!  HDR!"  As HDR software continues to develop that's no longer the case.  It's finally starting to achieve the original goal: to produce high dynamic range images.

  Whether or not to add  artistic embellishments, and  the degree to which they're noticeable, is increasingly in the hands of the operator.

• +Max Huijgen  Thank you for that, I was returning from a workshop yesterday and had some time to consider your question.  The blog post was written after considering the points you made, and a reference to it was included in the response comment I just posted.

• +David R Robinson  Yes!  Software will continue to develop to overcome the remaining limitations of digital camera sensors, and capturing multiple exposures is the best way today to give that software more data wo work with.

  As I mention in my new blog post this morning, six days before I had captured this photo in January 2009, I had written a blog post including the following:
  "Many people vilify HDR; I don't get it. Most people play guitar poorly, but that won't keep me from enjoying the work of many talented guitarists. Of course everyone's entitled to their opinion and their own tastes. If classical music fans want to say, 'Ugh, I think I hear a guitar in that piece!', or photography fans want to say 'Ugh, Galen Rowell used graduated neutral density filters!', that's their privilege. Surely HDR software will get better and better at expanding dynamic range while producing unobtrusive results, and as that value is delivered for more and more shots, I'll have terabytes of exposure-bracketed images to draw upon."
  Why Would Anyone Use HDR? It's Unreal!
  http://activesole.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-would-anyone-use-hdr-it-unreal.html

  Since then we've seen luminance masking and other methods appear for combining exposures, but the principles are the same.

• Posted a long comment on your other post at https://plus.google.com/u/2/107459220492917008623/posts/XP2DsymVMLC