Practical Photography

High Dynamic Range Photography or HDR Photography is the latest technique in photo editing that is startng to be used in a variety of mediums.

Computer graphics in photography are becoming more and more popular, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) allows a greater range of exposures, this is the range of values between light and dark areas.

HDR Photography techniques enable a much better interpretation of real life tones and shadows, giving a more intense contrast between sunlit areas and shadows.
High Dynamic Range Imaging has been around since the 1930s and 1940s, developed by Charles Wyckoff the technique was used to show nuclear explosions in much more detail which appeared in the early 1940s on the cover of Life magazine. The process consists of tone mapping bracketed exposures of normal digital images, the end result is an intense and sometimes exaggerated dynamic range.

Paul Debevec reported that a method of using differently exposed images of the same subject or composition could be combined to produce a single HDR image, this was published in 1993.
This method evolved and with the increasing polpularity of digital cameras and software the term HDR has grown in popularity and become a frequently used term.