Congratulations Alex Vincent, March 2024 PFRE Photographer of the Month! The theme this month was "Kitchen". Alex Vincent - #906 Yvonne Raaijmakers - #909 Peter Wingfield - #902 Here's what Alex has to say: Thank you for the award of Photographer of th ...
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What if I told you that you could dramatically increase the dynamic range of your camera's raw files? This might be old news to many of you, but I was recently reminded that there are a lot of folks who might not understand the difference between HDR and an HDR DNG.
"I know about HDR and I don't like how it looks!" Yeah, me too. But this is not HDR HDR... The kind of gross, tone mapped, no-contrast looking images that give HDR a bad name. This is using a bracket of raw files from your camera; say, -1 EV, 0 EV, +1 EV, and using Lightroom to merge those files together to create a new raw file with hugely expanded dynamic range, and unless you really crank the shadows and highlight recovery, it has none of that gross "HDR look". I want to reiterate, it's a raw file, and it still retains all of the information available from the original raw files.
This is especially useful in real estate
Merging a raw bracket into an HDR DNG can also lengthen the life of older cameras that work perfectly well but might not have the best dynamic range. I used them extensively with my Canon 7D before I picked up the EOS R, which has a sensor capable of a much greater dynamic range.
It's not going to replace a flash workflow, and it doesn't always merge files perfectly, but I have found it to be an incredibly useful tool. My new Ricoh Theta Z1 even has a plugin you can install to automatically create an HDR DNG in-camera--a feature I would love to see implemented in mirrorless and DSLR cameras!
