If… your 32 bit image looks pretty good, most likely your scene did not need HDR
If …your 32 bit image looks really bad, chances are you captured a true High Dynamic Range scene
I don’t know how many of you stop Photomatics at the point when it creates a 32 Bit Image just before you go on to tone-mapping. If you don’t then maybe you should (it’s on the screen when you make your alignment and de-ghosting choices)
The 32 bit image can really tell you a lot about what you captured and how in the end your image will turn out.
Here is a 32 bit image of 3 exposures +/- 2 and it is somewhat fitting. As you can see it doesn’t look too bad right now, but the final result really wasn’t that much different than the 0 exposure.
While on the other hand, this 32 bit image shows that there was in fact a wide dynamic range that could not be capture in one exposure.
I’ll be back tomorrow with more on my Salton Sea shoot.
Hope that helps,
PT
2 Comments
Quick question: doesn’t your monitor only show you 8bits of the 32 bit image? So if it looks good on your monitor then it means that 8 bits was enough? Just curious, since I’m not sure about it.
That’s correct Miguel, Most Monitors are 8 bit with a few igh ened models for video production being 10 bit. The better ones have a dynamic range of about 1000:1. So if our 32bit image si clearly visible, we probably are not much past that 1000:1 DR. and probably didn’t need to do HDR in the first place.
This is the essence of why we Tone Map images, To compress them to a point that is visible on Current Monitors and in in Print. Butwe must first capture that high dynamic range in order to get a usable HDR Tone Mapped Image