Thursday, September 9, 2010

HDR Video

Allow me to geek out for a moment.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and has been a popular little photographic trick for a few years now. An example of HDR can be seen in this photo on the right. More examples of High Dynamic Range can be seen here.

To put it in the simplest term, it is a photograph without shadows.

In more detail, what HDR is is a combination of several photos shot at different exposure levels, from a very under-exposed version that lets in less light (which lets bright areas show up well, but causes dark/shadow areas to be too dark) to a very over-exposed version that lets in more light (which washes out the bright areas, but allows the dark/shadow areas to appear). Then, the photos are combined together by a computer program so that all of the areas are equally exposed.

Well, obviously that's a bit of a complicated thing, making a single HDR image. So, you can imagine that making HDR video is pretty amazing, but that is what San Francisco studio Soviet Montage has done. The effects are pretty nice.

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