Use HDR Without Making It Look Like It

Okay digital photographers, have you produced HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos? When I first saw HDR back around 2006, I thought of how wonderful the images were but I didn't want my images to necessarily look like a 'HDR image.' Today I was going over photos I shot on my trip to Las Vegas with my wife in September. I came across a photo I shot of the Beverly Hills City Hall on a day trip we took to California.

To get the perfect exposure of City Hall I lost a lot of detail of the trees. The old days of making prints meant I would have to dodge and burn to get more detail and film didn't necessarily capture the detail in underexposed sections. Digital sensors do capture details in under or overexposed sections better making dodging and burning details produce better results. But that's still a pain in the butt to me. Another method would have been to shoot a series of bracketed shots and mask sections to blend together the different sections where the details show. That's exactly what HDR software does - bracket  a high contrast image and it merges them together.

But I only shot this image one time. No problem. I used Nik Software's HDR Efex Pro software and going through a series of preset samples I found the image that gave me all the detail in one image.

As you can see it did so without making it look like a 'HDR Image.' The only problem I had with the final image was that the added detail brought out a lot of chromatic noise. I didn't save the noisy example. I recommend using commercial noise rection software to eliminate as much noise as possible. I used Nik Software's Dfine 2.0 to produce this almost noise-free final image.

On occasion, making HDR images with bright colors and surreal contrast work very well. But don't overlook HDR software to correct shooting images in high contrast situations.