Realistic HDR tonemapping

Lately I’ve spent some time experimenting with HDR tonemapping using Photomatix Pro and Photoshop. I find that most examples you bump into on the web demonstrate the ability of tonemapping to create very striking and surreal images. But actual benefit of this technique, in my opinion, is that it allows a photographer to capture a scene exactly the way it looks in real life. Granted, it is very gratifying to use tonemapping’s dynamic range compression to manipulate light in a creative manner, with results like the photograph above. What seems like an infrared shot of a snow-covered park is actually a photograph taken on a sunny day which presented lots of variations between lights and darks. Different exposures were assembled into an HDR image which was subsequently tonemapped. The resulting 16-bit image then went through some funky monochrome channel mixing in Photoshop.

However, it is interesting to see what happens when you use tonemapping in a more discreet fashion. With everyday subjects and settings, it is possible to obtain images which otherwise could not have been captured but which do not present that “in your face” effect. For a low-resolution medium (such as a web page), you can get by with bracketing the exposure using fast continuous-shooting mode and keep the camera handheld. If people don’t move too much, the artifacts associated with HDR misalignment are reduced to a minimum. This results in ordinary-looking photographs which correspond a lot more to the scene as it was originally framed in the viewfinder. The following images illustrate the point.