HDR - Breathing New Life into Old Photos

High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography has recently captured my fancy. I’ve been looking at some wonderfully talented photographers experimenting with HDR, and I’ve recently completed reading The HDRI Handbook by Christian Bloch. Intrigued, I decided to attempt some HDR images with my photos.

Since HDR requires you to have multiple images bracketed at different exposures, I decided to go looking through some of my older photos. I used to exposure bracket just about every shot when I was first learning photography, as I didn’t trust myself. Even so, there were many images that just didn’t seem good to me - and I archived them away. I decided to see if any of these would make good HDR images, and test the process.

I purchased Photomatix Pro for my HDR software, and proceeded to create the following tests.

This first test is based on a photo I took in Wales back in 2005. I had three exposures, so I combined them into this image. I then took into Photoshop and did a final edit with levels and cropping to a more widescreen / panoramic feel. This is the Final HDR photo (Click on the image to see a larger size).

©Barbara House. All Rights Reserved

Feeling kind of bold, I then went over to some of my photos from Paris. I ended up being critical with many of these photos, as they were kind of bland. Here’s the original photo at the original exposure (Note, this isn’t the exactly same frame, as you can tell by the boat in this photo. I accidentally deleted the mid range exposure of the same frame - but this will show you what the photo looked like before):

©Barbara House. All Rights Reserved

Again, I had two more bracketed shots so I used Photomatix pro and created an HDR image. I brought it into Photoshop and did some level adjustments. But while I loved the detail on almost everything, I hated what had been done to the sky. It looked all choppy with a lot of additional noise, so I selected just the sky around all the various building and applied Noise Ninja. I’m quite pleased with the final version here (even if I didn’t get the bridge perfectly straight. I’ve since purchased a bubble level - lol)

©Barbara House. All Rights Reserved

So I decided to try my luck on one more photo. I took a number of photos of the Tower Bridge in London. I had one shot I really liked, and I’ve actually sold that one via stock photography. But I decided to look at some of the other shots that hadn’t impressed me at the time. I found this one, with two other exposures, and decided to give it a shot as an HDR photo. Here’s the original image:

©Barbara House. All Rights Reserved

And here’s the image after editing in Photoshop. Again, I used Noise Ninja selectively on the sky only, and I’ve cropped to get rid of the railing:

©Barbara House. All Rights Reserved

- The Verdict -

I have to say I’m completely fascinated with HDR now. These photos were truly on my “throw-away” list, and I had to go digging to find these shots. But now I can’t wait to actually go out and shoot some new photos specifically for HDR. It’s truly brought new life to these old photos, and a new passion to my photography.

Barbara House is an avid photography hobbyist and the face behind Shutterbug Source Photography Tips. After falling in love with photography in 2001, she has become dedicated to providing resources to other photography enthusiasts through this weblog - as well as pursuing her own photography career and becoming active in the photography community internationally.

Additional HDR Resources on the Web:

MY FAVORITE! -> HDR Tutorial - I hope this tutorial describing my evolving HDR techniques proves useful to you! I receive a lot of emails from people who stumble across my photography asking how I do this. Rather than sending a super-long response, I made this little tutorial because I was feeling particularly open-source one day. I keep this blog and try to post one interesting picture per day. About 75% of my work is HDR, so if you hang out on StuckInCustoms.com, I’ll do my best to keep fresh images for you to see every day!

Creating HDR Photography - Since I began my attempts at HDR Photography earlier this year, I’ve fielded many questions from folks wondering how I get my photos to look the way that they do. Well first off, HDR or High Dynamic Range Photography isn’t too difficult …

HDR photography tutorial - Well in this tutorial I’ll explain the basics of HDR photography. I will not get too technical, but just provide the information you need to achieve a good-looking HDR image. What you need:. A good digital camera. …

HDR Photography of Japan - The picture above may look as if it’s computer generated and fake, however that is a real photo of Akihabara. Using HDR Photography, HDR Japan has captured a unique look of Akihabara that cannot be seen naturally by the human eye. …

HDR: High Dynamic Range Photography - High dynamic range (HDR) images enable photographers to record a greater range of tonal detail than a given camera could capture in a single photo. This opens up a whole new set of lighting possibilities which one might have previously avoided—for purely technical reasons.