Guarding the Beaches of LA, by Stuck in Customs on Flickr

Old solution to this problem

If you were facing such a scene in the old days of film, you had to analyze the scene and determine what the key tones were. Often, you needed to hold the highlights and allow some clipping in dense shadows or other dark areas. Sometimes the key tones were dark and you were forced to allow blown highlights. And in some cases, you would decide that the scene couldn’t be compromised. In other words: you couldn’t capture it the way you wanted, so you didn’t!

Thank the spirits we now live in a digital age! Now you can capture this scene using HDR.

My two cents in the HDR argument

Before I move on, I want to address the fact that HDR is frowned upon by some people. There are several reasons for this. Some claim that bracketing or multi-exposure shooting is counter-skillful (elitists). Others think that using HDR is “cheating”, creating a falsified representation of “reality”.

Ignore those people.

HDR is not cheating. Nor is it the path to enlightenment. It’s just another tool in your photography toolbox, to be pulled out when you feel the situation demands it.

Enough ramble! Let’s get on with the subject!

What is HDR photography?

HDR photography is the principle of using multiple shots to capture a high range scene, and then merge these shots together digitally on a computer during post-processing.

The process involves using specialized software tools. These tools will use the different exposures to create an “optimal” representation of the scene, ensuring that the clipped shadows or highlights are excluded from the resulting image. A little simplified, this enables you to expose detailed information in the shadows from the brightest exposures, and details in the highlights from the darkest exposures.

Old suitcase scene analysis

As you can see in the above image, the scene has a high range between the sun on the wall and the suitcase interior. When the interior is correctly exposed, the wall light is completely blown out. And when the sun on the wall is correctly exposed, the photo is underexposed overall, and almost all detail inside the suitcase is lost. To capture this scene, HDR is necessary.

HDR is in its infancy

HDR is still in its infancy. This means that although we’ve had it a few years in still photography, the tools and techniques are going to grow a lot more mature in the future. Camera manufacturers will definitely make use of HDR in some sort in future models to increase their cameras’ ability to cope with high dynamic range scenes.

And also, the tools for post-processing will grow much more mature. Still, some of the tools we have today are already relatively sophisticated. With proper knowledge we are able to create high quality HDR images.

Building the scene

Our own vision is rather limited for taking in a scene as a whole. But our mind has a wonderful way of compensating for this. Our eyes rapidly move around the scene, registering it bit by bit, and our mind then combines these visual impressions into one experienced scene. The brain is also an expert in completing known things where only a part is visible. If we see a car where half of it is hidden by a corner, our brain completes the car for us.

When moving around like this, our eyes quickly adjust to the light and tones of the different areas. And that is pretty much the same as we do with multiple exposures for HDR, except that the camera captures the whole scene in every shot. But we expose for limited areas with each shot.

So, in a sense, one might argue that HDR is more “natural” than capturing a scene with one shot!

Capturing the scene

First and foremost; if you have the choice: use a tripod! Slight movement from hand-held shooting can be compensated by the software, but you will be so much better off by making sure your image data is of the highest possible quality!

How many exposures you need will depend on the given scene. Often, around five exposures are needed. Today, most SLR cameras have a clipping indicator you can enable on the screen, and most also have the option to show a histogram.

Start out by under-exposing the scene. Under-expose to such a degree that the histogram is jammed up on the left side of the histogram, clipping the shadows. Slow down the shutter 1 full stop, and take a second shot (yes, the shutter; the aperture is fixed during HDR shooting!). Slow down another full stop, and take another shot.

Continue shooting in full-stop steps until the darkest part of the histogram is around the center of the scale. (Yes, that means that I should have shot at least one, maybe two stops more in the example shot!) This ensures you record all details in the darkest shadows.

HDR shooting sequence with histograms

Pitfalls when shooting for HDR

There are some pitfalls when shooting for HDR. Among the most common are ghosting, flare, banding and haloing. Ghosting is caused by movement, flare by light from a bright light source. Haloing and banding usually occurs when there are sharp edges between light or dark in the scene. Common examples are around the edges of a window in interior scenes, and at the edge between a dark building wall or roof and a bright blue sky.

I will return to these pitfalls in a follow-up article on HDR tonemapping.

Merging into a HDR image

There are several tools on the market for generating HDR images. I will focus on Photomatix as this is the oldest (and probably best-known) tool out there.

In this introductory article I will not go into details on how to tonemap. I only adjusted a little, mostly the saturation slider. You can experiment with this a little on your own. In a follow-up article I will delve deeper into the technicalities of producing the best possible result using tonemapping.

In Photomatix, click the Generate HDR image shortcut. In the following dialog, browse and select the sequence of photos.

The next dialog is the Options dialog. I recommend that you always check the “Align source images” choice, even when a tripod was used.

Then click the “Generate HDR” button. Photomatix then merges the photos and generates an HDR image. The resulting temporary image then shown is unprocessed and does not show the full range. Your next step is to click the “Tone Mapping” button. This will produce an image where you see the full details in both shadows and highlights.

As stated previously, this article will not cover the tone mapping process. Feel free to play around with the various sliders and see how they affect the photo.

Old suitcase HDR (non-optimized), by Marius Waldal

As you can see above, the various exposures have merged into one photo where both the highlights and the shadows are held, and all details are shown.

I hope this introduction was helpful and that you are hungry for more! I will revisit this subject in a later post with more detailed info on how to perform successful tone mapping!

If you liked this post, you may also like:

1. How to simulate cross-processing in digital photography
2. How to create a black&white image with selective colors in Photoshop
3. Introduction to digital black & white photography

Partly because of the great inheritance of old monochrome masters like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Edward Weston and (many) others. Monochrome is for many strongly associated with and often favored for reportage photography (even today), especially for “serious” topics like war, poverty and suffering.

But monochrome also has an artistic leverage. It is by many viewed as more serious than color, which is often considered a distracting element. As I will come back to below, removing color puts emphasis on other artistic qualities in a photograph.

This is the first article in a planned series of articles covering monochrome photography. This first article discusses monochrome photography in general, while the upcoming articles will mostly cover small topics in a little more depth, some with hands-on case studies.

… and I hear the Sound of Summer Running, by TommyOshima on Flickr

Monochrome in the digital age

Before digital, the choice of color versus monochrome had to be taken before shooting. Today, you can browse through your images and decide if any of them would perhaps be better off as monochrome. And some photos may work equally well in both versions, though differently.

Film is monochrome, and so is the sensor in your digital camera. To achieve color, your sensor is covered with a filter (usually a Bayer filter) that records the color information in the light coming through your lens. So in digital photography, the end result is always a color photo, meaning that the color must be removed to achieve monochrome. Sounds quirky?

This is actually a great advantage! In digital post-processing, the tonal response of each hue can be adjusted separately. This means that you can use the original color information to apply local tonal adjustments during post-processing.

Some colors have similar brightness values. This means that if you convert a photo to monochrome, some colors look fairly identical in grey, resulting in loss of contrast, depth or detail.

Example:

Consider a photo that contains two colors that are equally bright, like red and green. If this photo is converted plain into monochrome, the distinction between these two elements can barely be seen. If the photo depicts a red ball in front of a green wall, the ball would all but disappear for lack of contrast between the two. A film photographer could counter this by applying a filter in front of the lens, but the decision had to be taken in advance. With digital, you can adjust the red color information afterward, applying the contrast that was lost during default conversion.

Learn more about color in the article “Color in photography – Color theory“

Effects of removing color

Waterworld, by Dave G Kelly on Flickr

This is true in all situations, of course, not only photography. For every element that is removed, more focus is concentrated on the elements that remain.

Another effect is that you get a lot more leeway in what level of adjustments people will accept. This is because monochrome never directly represents normality, being devoid of color. You can therefore allow yourself to pull harder on the controls to manipulate a photo, and still produce acceptable results. There is a lot of psychology in this. If something is close to reality, our mind will not accept much alteration to it before we will view it as just that; altered. But as monochrome is already a big leap from representing reality as it is, then we will accept a great deal more. (I am pretty sure that the color version of the feature photo on top of this article would not have endured the amount of adjustments made to the monochrome version, but in monochrome I think it looks great!)

Which photos are suitable for monochrome?

Multi-leveled softness, by Marius Waldal

Of course, there are no absolutes here. Over-simplified, you might say that any photo where color is not an important part is suitable. But that’s not very helpful, is it? Here’s a few rules of thumb to store in the back of your head:

If color creates conflict – Color can create conflicts on multiple levels. It might be colors that don’t go well together or colors that are just unpleasing to look at. But most often, it will be subordinate elements in the photo that steal attention from the main subject because they are brightly colored. Or maybe a subordinate element has the same color as the main subject, and therefore needs to be subdued? In this situation, you might also consider using both color and monochrome, with the use of selective coloring.

If color does not add to the photo – If the color in a photo does not do anything to enhance a photo or add to the overall quality, removing color may be an advantage.

If your main subject’s shape or form is a little subdued (or you just want to emphasize it) – Sometimes, your main subject may be a little subdued by its surroundings. If, for example, your subject is a rocky formation in the middle of the woods, the multitude of different green tones, leaves and twigs may create a chaotic appearance. Removing color may reduce the chaos and force the eyes to focus more on shape and form.

If you want to create (or emphasize) a somber mood – Monochrome, especially low-key, is great for emphasizing melancholy, seriousness, sadness, somberness etc.

If you aim for simplicity – Fewer elements may simplify your photo.

If the dynamic range is very high – A very high dynamic range forces you to accept clipping either in the shadows or in the highlights. Most people are more prone to accept loss of information in shadow areas. And as we are naturally accustomed to monochrome environments with lots of dense shadows (whenever we’re in the dark), we will also more readily accept loss of shadow detail in monochrome photos than in color.

If you want an “artsy” look – For many, monochrome is more associated with art than is color.

Or the best reason of them all:

If you just love black & white photography!

Shooting for monochrome

Having said that the path to digital monochrome is always via color, I didn’t mean that monochrome photography now is merely a post-processing activity. With experience you will enhance your creative vision and learn to anticipate what type of scenes, lighting and composition will work well in monochrome. Shooting for monochrome means that you have the resulting monochrome image in mind even before you start shooting. It means that you plan and compose your photo for monochrome.

What this entails is that you are able to visualize how the resulting scene will (or should) look in monochrome. A photographer experienced in monochrome will look at the colors in a scene and be able to see how these colors translate into monochrome, or even be able to look through them. You can learn that too!

The road ahead

What I aim to do in the following articles is to give you a better understanding of the differences between color and monochrome, and help you learn to think in black and white. I also hope to provide a little toolbox that you can use when digging into your existing photos to create exciting monochrome photographs.

If you liked this post, you may also like:

1. HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography – An introduction
2. How to create a black&white image with selective colors in Photoshop