Pioneer Spirit

Can 168 pages change your approach to photography?

High Dynamic Range Ima­ging (HDRI) is no longer the curi­osity that it was a year or two ago — but it remains at the cutting–edge of cur­rent pho­to­graphic prac­tice, and is an intriguing lens through which to anti­cipate the future of com­pu­ta­tional photography.

At its heart, HDRI enables pho­to­graphers to cap­ture — in mul­tiple expos­ures — a record of the true dynamic range present in a scene, rather than the far smaller dynamic range that cam­eras are able to record in a single exposure. The prac­tical benefit of this is that HDR images are able to provide a more faithful record of our visual impres­sions of the world around us. This how­ever is but one side of the coin. HDR images con­tain an enormous amount of visual inform­a­tion, and there are a number of ways in which this inform­a­tion can be inter­preted. For those new to the field, ‘Prac­tical HDRI — High Dynamic Ima­ging for Pho­to­graphers’ by Jack Howard delves into this new pho­to­graphic dis­cip­line, and this title will give you the con­fid­ence to incor­porate HDRI into your image-making.

Jack Howard is a well known pho­to­journ­alist — cur­rently editor at PopPhoto.com, and a con­trib­uting editor to Amer­ican Photo magazine — and his writing style is clearly shaped by his web/magazine back­ground. Howard man­ages to convey HDRI without recourse to poten­tially intim­id­ating tech­nical explan­a­tions, and this is one of the great strengths of ‘Prac­tical HDRI’. The author’s stated aim is to help readers find their ‘HDR eye’ (a ter­rible pun), and the vast number of images throughout the text ensure that you will.

One of the regret­table short­com­ings of this title how­ever, is that none of the images included within the text are avail­able for exper­i­ment­a­tion (which in a book of this nature is fairly unusual). The author addresses this during the intro­duc­tion, explaining that ‘pho­to­graphers are most invested in their own images’, and there­fore readers are to exper­i­ment with their own images. I am not the first reviewer to find fault with this decision. I believe that a title written for begin­ners should provide its audi­ence with inspir­a­tional prac­tice files, so as to motivate its read­er­ship to invest in its recom­mend­a­tions. Were this book not pitched for the abso­lute beginner, the author’s decision would be far easier to comprehend.

If this book rep­res­ents your first foray into HDRI, then you will find the author’s con­cise writing style covers a lot of ground. In con­cert with the number of screen­shots devoted to each topic, ‘Prac­tical HDRI’ should fill you with con­fid­ence. The title covers: equip­ment recom­mend­a­tions; image cap­ture tech­niques; HDR gen­er­a­tion; advanced mer­ging tech­niques; tone–mapping; and post–tone–mapping image optim­iz­a­tion. Each topic is dis­cussed in detail, and I found in par­tic­ular that the tone–mapping chapter was par­tic­u­larly well written.

HDRI applic­a­tion UI’s are notori­ously dif­fi­cult to com­pre­hend, so the detailed intro­duc­tions into Pho­to­matix Pro (3.0), FDRTools Advanced (2.2), Dynamic Photo HDR (3.x), and the HDR options avail­able within Adobe Pho­toshop (CS3), greatly reduce the ini­tial learning curves. Neth­er­the­less, the author’s explan­a­tions of these tools is not exhaustive, and on a number of occa­sions I found myself cursing the page–count, when cer­tain options were glossed–over. Addi­tion­ally, although Howard’s explan­a­tions of the tone–mapping pro­cess in each applic­a­tion are by far the clearest that I have read, he repeatedly advises readers to move the sliders around (whilst watching the image his­to­gram) to learn what each func­tion does, rather than provide a clear explan­a­tion of his own.

On some occa­sions mul­tiple screen­shots accom­pany the author’s explan­a­tions, which can be helpful — how­ever, cer­tain adjust­ments are too nuanced to be clearly appre­ci­ated in print. It is on these occa­sions that you will find your­self bemoaning the fact that there is no sup­porting web­site avail­able for readers. Given Howard’s prom­in­ence at PopPhoto.com, this is dif­fi­cult to under­stand. Who­ever made the decision that the book should stand alone has done a great dis­ser­vice to its read­er­ship. In a field as new as HDRI, soft­ware advances at a rate that will render this title rap­idly obsolete. Indeed, some three months after pub­lic­a­tion some of the con­tent is already out–of–date. Although the author acknow­ledges this problem within the text, he offers no remedy.

Finally, the author’s advice about file man­age­ment is ter­rible, and should be ignored without hes­it­a­tion. Con­sult Peter Krogh’s excel­lent digital asset man­age­ment sug­ges­tions (start at: thedambook.com) for far better advice in this regard.

This post is tagged Computational Photography, HDRI, Resources, Reviews