The New York Times talks about H.D.R. Photography.

“Although H.D.R. photos are often compared to paintings, they are an attempt by software makers to allow photography to more accurately mimic human vision.

Dynamic range measures how great a difference between light and dark can be captured by a digital camera or film. Relative to the human eye, all photography has a limited dynamic range, and digital photography suffers even more than film.

It is this limitation that leads to landscape photos where a dramatic sky appears as a washed-out smudge. A classic example of the problem is trying to photograph a room’s interior while still capturing the view outside its windows. In that case, photographers are usually forced to choose either the room or its view as their subject.

“The concept of H.D.R. photography is fairly simple. It starts with a photographer harvesting every bit of difference in brightness by taking several different photos of the same scene, with large exposure differences between them. Software then sorts through the resulting images, which range from underexposed views that are nearly black to washed-out overexposures, to calculate the full dynamic range of the view. Using that vast amount of data, it then constructs a single, high dynamic range photo.

At least that’s the theory. While the actual practice can be highly automated, it is slightly more complicated.

These H.D.R enhanced photos, such as those shown in the New York Times, look like illustrations or highly polished paintings – but they’re still photographs.  I think the story here is not so much about High Dynamic Range Photos but the power that highend Adobe Software brings to the average photographer who has many more options of where to go with their photos than ever before.