From the course: HDR Photography: Shooting and Processing

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Single-shot HDR images in Photomatix

Single-shot HDR images in Photomatix

From the course: HDR Photography: Shooting and Processing

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Single-shot HDR images in Photomatix

Earlier I mentioned a technique called faux-HDR, which is kind of a phony HDR process and you may have thought about this already. If normally for HDR I need to shoot a normally exposed image, an underexposed image, and an overexposed image, why can't I just take my normally exposed image into my RAW processor, create an underexposed version, save that out, then create an overexposed version, save that out, and pass those three final images off to my HDR merging process? That is actually what the faux-HDR technique is. It's creating a bracketed set from a single original. And it works pretty well, but it's not actually a full-on substitute for truly shooting a bracketed set. And here's why. If I shoot this image like this, taking it into my RAW converter and darkening it simply does not yield the same information as actually shooting a darker image and truly capturing that different tonal range. So this is a bit of a hack. It's a fake thing. It is again faux-HDR, but it can work very…

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