I got a new camera, but I haven't really gone out yet to take pictures. One of the things that I would love to try is HDR imaging. A bunch of the people I watch have done an amazing job of it, and I want to try it as well.

For those who don't know what it is, the concept is simple. Basically, cameras aren't yet as good as the human eye when picking up contrast in different lighting settings. The simplest example I can think of is outdoor photography on a cloudy day. You either take a picture of your subject (be it a building, animal, or person), or of the sky, but either way, the picture just doesn't come out right. Usually for me, the sky is washed out if I can see the subject, or the subject is cast in shadows and all looks dull, except the clouds which have vivid detail. Option C is that the picture in general is bad as you have both problems.

HDRi (High Dynamic Range imaging) gets over this by combining a few pictures with different exposures, to get all of the high-light and low-light details.

As you can see from those examples, the end result is a very wide contrast range that must be tweaked by human. And then have some detail taken away (because native HDR photographs are 32-bit, not 16, or 8 bit, like our moniters and printers.

These shots are achieved by taking (at least) 3 shots (though, the more there are, the better the result) of different exposure levels (at least one over-exposed, one under-exposed, and one that has the correct exposure), combining them using specialized programs (though Photoshop now has the capability as of CS2), and then 'tone mapping' the images down to 16 or 8 bit color (the tone mapping is done so as to give a sense of high contrast in a defined range).

For more information, please do some of your own research, as the reason for this journal posting is more of a plea for help. I am by no means and expert, so go find someone who is... If anyone could give me some advice or some pointers on the subject at hand, that would be great.

I had a bout of insomnia last night, and decided to get out of bed at 6:30am to try and take pictures of the sunrise through my sister's tie-dyed bedroom curtains (though, I should point out, she is/was not here, she is off at college, so I wasn't sneaking into her room in the early morning and creeping her out or anything). I took about 5 shots (without moving the camera).

I then brought them down and loaded them into my computer. merged them via Photoshop CS3's 'Merge to HDR' feature, and it looked nice enough, but then when I tried to tone map it, it went downhill...

So if anyone has some advice, please offer it up.

Thanks