The summer travel season is here again. How fascinating it is to carry your own luggage, forget the worries of work and life, and go to nature to relax and release your mood. But in front of the beautiful scenery, because the light is too strong and the contrast is too great, it is impossible to use the camera in your hand to completely record the whole scenery. How depressing it is!
In photography of high-contrast scenes, the traditional method is to retain more details by underexposing the photos to a certain extent. However, the powerful post-processing technology in the digital era now allows us to obtain a wider range of images through special technical means. For photos with dynamic range, we call this technology HDR technology.
Today, we will use Photoshop to synthesize a typical snow mountain landscape photo as an example to introduce to you how to correctly use HDR synthesis technology to obtain a perfect landscape photo.
Quick facts: What is HDR
HDR is the abbreviation of English High-Dynamic Range, which means "high dynamic range". This is a simple term. An HDR photo is a picture that uses multiple pictures with different exposures and superimposes them using Photoshop software. The advantage of HDR technology is that it allows you to get a picture with details in both shadows and highlights. In normal photography, you can only choose one of the two. Simply put, HDR photos can be summarized in three sentences:
1. Bright areas can be very bright 2. Dark areas can be very dark 3. Details in bright and dark areas are obvious
Tips: High-Contrast Scenes
What is a high-contrast scene? Due to technical reasons, our cameras are actually unable to completely record all the light information in nature that the human eye can see. Therefore, when encountering a scene with strong light, due to the large gap between the grayscale positions of the bright and dark parts of the scene, a high contrast situation is formed. Common high-contrast scenes include: woods in the foreground, snowy mountains, blue sky and white clouds in the background; mountains in the foreground, and the sunset in the background; the sky is extremely bright, and the ground is dark... Shooting high-contrast scenes is a problem often encountered in photography. Unfortunately, there is currently no camera that can achieve the same range of light reflection as the human eye.
1. Preparation
The early stage of HDR is actually the shooting of basic materials. We need photos that reflect the details of each part, and they can be partially underexposed or partially overexposed. To obtain footage, we usually use the M stop to shoot, and take a total of 3 or more photos with exposure values ranging from small to large.
The three photos in Figures 1, 2, and 3 are the material photos we will use to explain HDR technology today. We can see that the three photos reflect the details of different light brightness. Next, let’s take a look at how to synthesize an HDR photo.
Figure 1
Figure 2