Is HDR Dead?

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Toni Zappone
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Is HDR Dead?

"There is much discussion these days about HDR being dead. To be sure, almost no one in photography likes the HDR look (oddly, 100% of non-photographers do like that look). In addition, there are a lot of great tools these days for dealing with dynamic range problems without resorting to HDR. Nevertheless, black and white photos are one area where HDR is still very useful. Since there is no color, part of the surreal nature of HDR is avoided."

Complete article at: http://digital-photography-school.com/improve-your-middle-of-the-day-pho...

Seth Silverstein
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I strongly disagree. I've had some very good results with color landscapes when I take a sequence of raw files and process them using lightroom's HDR processor. Example image:

Gerry Bishop
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I agree with Seth on this one. I had been using the Nik HDR processor, but then switched to Lightroom's when it appeared last year. I found the results to be much more natural looking than the Nik results, and better than any other HDR images I had seen.

Sandy Hodge
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I also disagree. I use it on buildings to bring up more structure than Viveza (nik). I will often use the quick selection tool in photoshop to select just a building and use HDR, then use something like Viveza for the rest of the picture. That way the colors don't get too saturated.

James DeYoung
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Greetings, I believe that HDR is alive and well. Perhaps, today with sensor dynamic ranges improving it is needed less but any scene that has deep shadows and nearly blown out highlights in a properly exposed single image can benefit from HDR techniques. You can make HDR images that look realistic or you can stretch them to pretty much anything that makes you happy! I most often use HDR for interior scenes when you want to also see what was out the window on a bright day. I also use it a lot with my fisheye, wide-angle lens shots when the Sun is in the image to retain details of the clouds near the Sun.

Gerry Bishop
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Agree that HDR is indispensable when shooting a relatively dark room without having blown-out windows. My method is to expose for the interior, the windows, and everything in between and then run the images through Lightroom HDR. If the output looks good, I'm done. If not, I'll try to cut and past the good window exposure into the best interior exposure.