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I hear a lot about HDR, what is it & does my card (AGP) & DX9 work with it?
Advise most welcome.:yep:
Thanks
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In pictures terms, HDR is High Dynamic Range. This is something that digital photographers are getting into since the past two iterations of Photoshop have been capable of dealing with High Dynamic Range images. Effectively, what they are is an amalgum of several images in an attempt to emulate how the human eye perceives something, and are hopefully going to combine with L.A.B. colour and HD TVs at some point in the future and make TV images look a lot better as the colours will approach the gamut range that the human eye can process.
For example: if you take a glass ashtray and put it on a desk, and then look at it, you will notice that your eye does not take it all in at once, but instead will jump its focus around, taking in perhaps the glass of the ashtray, then maybe the cigarette butts in it, then perhaps the shadow of it on the desktop and the way the light diffuses as it hits the desk having shone through the glass (normally you wouldn't notice your eye doing that unless you actually think about it while looking). What this means in photography terms is that a single exposure cannot truly emulate how the eye sees something like that because the eye interprets several 'snapshots' in rapid succession. So, in an attempt to emulate this, a High Dynamic Range image is made up of several exposures, then combined to create a kind of 'super real' picture. So in our example, you might take an exposure for the glass ashtray, one for the shadows and table surface, and perhaps one for the butts in the ashtray, then combine them using the utility in Photoshop (or any other processing software capable of doing it for that matter).
If you see some spectacularly impressive shots on photo sites such as image bank and others who sell pics for use in publications, the chances are some of them will be HDR images. However, I have not come across that many people who are using it outside that genre. And if anyone should, it would be me, since I am an Adobe-certified trainer for Photoshop and teach advanced courses in it! Expect it to come into play more when HD television technology filters down to mass use, the technology becomes cheaper. And when the screens get better than they currently are and can rival the colour spread of conventional CRT tubes.
Your graphics card (if it is a newish one) probably does support it, but if you use a TFT monitor you probably won't see a lot of benefit from it.
:D Chock |
