Why HDR Black and White

Last one to share for the evening. This shot is an HDR Black and White that I did for my book “The HDR Book” http://bit.ly/rchdr – hope you check it out…

Why HDR Black and White

I’ve been experimenting with the concept for a bit and made it a chapter for people to wrap their head around, but here’s the gist:

Go back to something like The Zone System. Looking at from a 35,000 foot view – what was being said by Ansel Adams was “Lets take this area.. we will call this area tree and we will exposure it in a specific manner. See this part? This part is called rock and this will be exposed in this manner. See this? This is called edge of mountain and we will expose this part like so,,”

Now, these things weren’t called Rock, Tree, and Edge of mountain – he just gave them numbers and called them “Zones”. So, basically – the guy was looking at an image and selectively adjusting (or toning) portions of it as he liked them.

How different is this from what software does. When we run 5 brackets through HDR software, we move sliders around and things start looking different. This difference is just software doing exactly the same thing. It’s looking at the file, and selecting areas, and toning them a specific way, based on the slider you’re jiggling.

So.. what if you used all of the Hyper color result that you got in an HDR file, and then just used the color portion of it was a recipe for what goes black, what goes not so black, and what goes white. What happens then?

I’ll tell you… cool things…