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We found this photo by Terry Eggers to be a great example of how an HDR app like HDR Expose 2 can really benefit your photography even when it's not a true HDR scene. On their recent stock shooting trip to Maui the Eggers decided that a bunch of their images, like this one, would benefit from brightness and contrast adjustments in 32-bit mode to avoid color and contrast shifts.

Photo editing in 32-bit mode is neat. Why lose image data in CS before you have to? We're seeing more and more photographers get their basic brightness and contrast done in HDR Expose 2 or 32 Float v2 and then moving on to 16-bit editing in Photoshop. Try it!

Our last blog post featured the photography of Terry and Julie Eggers made on their recent trip to the far reaches of China. That post featured photos created in the Haungshan Mountains, a mountain range in southern Anhui province in eastern China. We now present their photos which feature the architecture and people of the region. Many of the shots below, while not true HDR images, were edited in HDR Expose 2 and HDR Express because of those applications great 32-bit handling of delicate colors, brightness and contrast.

Here's Terry:

Q: Can you give us an idea of your trip from an itinerary standpoint?

We decided to fly into Hong Kong via Tokyo because we knew there were some photo opportunities there. We shot there for a couple of days and then started the core of our trip by flying from Hong Kong to Guiling. Guiling served as a base for a number of side trips. One of the trips we made was to an underground cave area. It was remarkable.

Our globe circling friends, Terry and Julie Eggers just returned from a wonderful 24 day trip deep into China. They traveled through Guilin, Yangshuo, The Yellow Mountains, Beijing and back through Hong Kong. It’s a trip most photographers would like to take for the exotic images and the friendly people.

HDR photography played an important role in their work in China. We were fortunate to obtain a sample of their images during the few days they were home between trips. I also had a chance to chat with Terry about their China trip and we’re going to share that conversation with you in two parts. This first part highlights some nice HDR work in the country’s eastern mountains. Check back with us in a few days for a more cultural look at China.

Q: Can you tell us about the techniques you used for your mountain images?

We've been reading about this for a while, a camera that captures the entire lightfield. It's from Lytro. Lytro calls the images produced by the camera Living Pictures. And, you can refocus your photo after its taken! Could you employ this in your HDR photography? Let us know!

Focus after the fact.
Since you'll capture the color, intensity, and direction of all the light, you can experience the first major light field capability - focusing after the fact. Focus and re-focus, anywhere in the picture. You can refocus your pictures at anytime.

And focusing after the fact, means no auto-focus motor. No auto-focus motor means no shutter delay. So, capture the moment you meant to capture not the one a shutter-delayed camera captured for you.

Here's a great look at the image quality of the new Nikon D4 on the C/NET Australia site.

Hands on with the Nikon D4

Since taking the D4 out of its box, it has been our constant photographic companion for the past few days.

How does it stack up so far in our initial tests? Click through to read our impressions of the D4's image quality, as well as what it's like shooting with the camera in real-world situations.

Read More

Every once in a while we run across another way to describe HDR photography. There is the ongoing controversy over whether HDR constitutes real photography. We think HDR is advanced photography.

Here's a great explanation of HDR techniques we found in NDTV Gadgots.

No matter how many people look at a photograph shot using the 'High Dynamic Range' (HDR) technique, there will always be a handful who will challenge its authenticity as a photograph, and claim it to be either a painting or an elaborately photoshopped image. The struggle of convincing people that HDR qualifies as photography has been a long and arduous one, with both sides being supported by prominent figures in the field. The primary bone of contention arises from a lack of understanding of what the HDR technique is, and towards that end, here is a point-by-point break down of the process and its history.

First off, we must clearly understand what the HDR technique entails. When we take a single photograph of a scene, our camera captures a certain amount of color information, a certain amount of brightness information and a certain amount of contrast information. By virtue of the laws of physics, the digital sensor is only capable of capturing a limited amount of information, an amount that is far less than what the human eye can comprehend.

The range of information luminance (combination of color, contrast and brightness) that the camera sensor captures for ONE exposure is called the dynamic range of the sensor. For most modern DSLRs, this number varies between 7 and 11 stops of exposure whereas the eye can easily recognize up to 15 stops of information. However, when speaking of HDR images, we are most concerned with not the luminance information, but in capturing the widest possible gamut of contrast range. While modern day digital sensors have a contrast ratio of up to 2048:1, the human eye's contrast detection ranges from 1024:1 to 16384:1. This large contrast range is what enables us to see the tree leaves as green despite the sun shining from right behind them in a blue sky. Shoot the same scene with a camera and the green of the color will turn black and the sky would go absolutely white.

photo: John Santoro

Most HDR Software can accept JPEG, TIFF or RAW files as input for the merge process, and HDR Express and HDR Expose are no exceptions. If you only have JPEG or TIFF legacy images that you want to process you don’t have an option, but going forward you will get better results if you shoot and process RAW image files for HDR.

JPEG and TIFF files are great final output file types, but they have been processed causing clipped exposure ranges, artifacts due to applied contrast curves and in the case of JPEG files, artifacts due to compression.

When we merge individual images into 32-bit HDR images, we need to undo most of those changes to create the linear data to process the areas of exposure overlap. In many cases this works well, but in some cases such as extreme lighting conditions working with JPEG or TIFF source files can create areas of posterization where especially highlight data can be clipped in processed files. JPEG source images have the additional disadvantage of compression artifacts that will change the between the different exposures and create alignment issues.

Closeup of merged RAW image



Closeup of merged jpeg image with artifacts circled

Michael Testi at BlogCritics.org is loving HDR Expose 2 for its full-featured 32-bit workflow capabilities. In his testing of HDR photography software Michael was impressed by HDR Expose 2's improved real-time performance, the redesigned UI and clarified workflow process. He also notes that the new batch processing, when combined with the increase processing speeds and user presets, make for a really great HDR solution.

Testi writes:

HDR Expose 2 is the latest version of the professional HDR image creation program from Unified Color. This is a major upgrade that includes real-time processing, automatic halo reduction, and improved batch processing. It is a full feature application that provides much more than just tone mapping capabilities.

HDR Expose 2 performs all of its operations in the full 32-bit Beyond RGB Color Space which gives you direct access to the full human-perceptible color range while you are working. What this color space does is it separates the brightness channel from the color channel and that provides for better processing and little to no color shifts or halos.

Read the entire article here

We want to share with you Stan Sholik’s review of HDR Expose 2 titled “Speed, Improved Interface Come to HDR Expose 2.” for Professional Photographer online.

This week it was a real thrill for me to host a live webinar with photographer Richard Sisk to talk about HDR panoramic photography. Richard has been shooting panos professionally for many years and was able to share some of his legacy work as well as tips and techniques for creating digital HDR panoramas. We recorded the webinar and have so you can view it here

Part 1: http://youtu.be/89LHQ51XEZw
Part 2: http://youtu.be/2jYaBj1FkK0

Many people had questions about the motorized tripod head that Richard used for these photos so we've also posted a quick demo of the Seitz VR Drive that he used at Crater Lake that you can see here.

This webinar was one of the most popular we've done to date, and we look forward to hosting similar events with other professional photographers in the future. Click here to sign up for our newsletter to stay informed of upcoming events. Go to the bottom of the right hand column to enter your email address.

Click here http://www.unifiedcolor.com/video-tutorials for a complete list of video tutorials on product features and workflow tips.

–John