Only Angels Have Halos, or Just Because You Call It HDR, Doesn't Mean It Is

Last Monday, Adobe rolled out Creative Suite 5 which included many significant upgrades to its flagship Photoshop product. One of the new and improved features of Photoshop CS5 was support for HDR, so after seeing the announcement on Adobe's site I anxiously scoured the web for more information and found some of the first videos on the NAPP site.

Matt Kloskowski kicked things off nicely with this honest assessment "Now Photoshop has had HDR in it for quite a while, but its not always been that good and we've used other tools for HDR, but Adobe has answered that because HDR is gaining in popularity, Adobe has answered it with a whole new set of tools inside of Photoshop CS5..."

He then went on to merge several images and process it for the "Surreal Grunge Look" and call it HDR.

In another video, RC Concepcion goes even further to say "One of the great features of Photoshop CS5 is that you can do HDR toning without having multiple pictures! They made it in to an effect, and it is something you really need to take a look at ".... "A lot of discussion has been made about the concept of HDR, and inside Photoshop CS5 you've got some big advances that have been made in the world of HDR, but let's just be completely frank here, HDR is a scientific term that is used to be able to kind of measure a series of images and put them together to be able to see a tonal range, it really doesn't really necessarily address the effect that people like with HDR which is commonly known as tone mapping."

"So one of the things that I think is really, really cool inside Photoshop CS5 is the fact that, they've taken that and called HDR Toning for single images and HDR Pro a collection of images. Now, a lot of the time, people like the effect, but don't necessarily want to go through the process of getting multiple images together to be able to produce this."

Now, I am a big fan of NAPP, and a member. I think they provide great training and other resources to photographers, and their instructors are top notch. I also know that they have a very close working relationship with Adobe. They have obviously been privy to CS5 and the Adobe talking points for a while in order to produce these videos for the launch.

As a Photoshop user myself, I applaud the many improvements in Photoshop CS5, but I think Adobe has really missed the mark with respect to HDR. They do the imaging community a disservice by perpetuating the myth of "The HDR Look" to mean grungy, over processed, over saturated, hyper realistic, images with halos that most photographers would go out of their way to avoid when sharpening regular images. I'm not saying that there isn't a time or place for this look, it is an artistic style. Who am I to critique someone else's artistic vision?

On the other hand, I do happen to own two very good HDR sensors, it is not a new technology, and they weren't introduced last Monday either. In fact I've been working with these for more than 40 years now. They're called my eyes. I have been seeing the world in HDR almost since the day I was born, and the only time I have ever seen the over processed "HDR Look" is when I look at one of these images. The real world HDR doesn't have halos. The real world has a wide dynamic range and real color that the human visual system tends to be very good at interpreting. It is the current camera technology that has a problem with it. So we overcome this deficiency with real HDR tools in order to recreate the tonal range of an image that we as humans can perceive, but the cameras are unable to. And yes, that currently requires taking multiple images at different exposures to capture all the tonal information that the camera missed, there is no free lunch here.

This True Color HDR World has a natural look, it requires real color 32-bit processing tools. In fact when it is done right, most people will only notice a beautiful photograph with a great tonal range. That is what real High Dynamic Range Imaging is.

So let's all decide to be honest and call it what it really is. True HDR imaging recreates the original tonal range of a scene for another medium of lower dynamic range (e.g. monitor or print). Everything else is as RC Concepcion said is just "the effect" that desperately needs to have a new name without HDR in it.

To experience what real HDR can do, check out the free 30-day trial version of HDR PhotoStudio here.

Links to the NAPP videos referenced:
RC Concepcion on HDR Single Image at www.photoshopuser.com/cs5
Matt Kloskowski New HDR Pro at www.photoshopuser.com/cs5