High Dynamic Range Digital Photography
Submitted by mitch on Sun, 01/18/2009 - 00:05.
I purchased three books last week on HDR photography. I reviewed Mastering HDR Photography by Michael Freeman earlier this week.
I strongly recommend High Dynamic Range Digital Photography by Ferrell McCollough. One strong feature is the HDR examples. Candidly, some are over the top in terms of saturation. But you will also find inspiring examples for a large number of contributing photographers.
High Dynamic Range Digital Photography is published by Lark Books. Instead of the two-page spreads that have become typical of Lark Books, High Dynamic Range Digital Photography skips that in favor of traditional chapters and longer discussions.
I've seen a lot of tutorials and discussion on HDR that are overly-technical. It's my belief that many photographers want plain, simple advice. How many shots to take, how wide to bracket the shots, what to do about noise, etc. The technical prose in this boook is a pleasant read. The book is neither overly technical nor overly simple. Just good, solid technical writing.
If you are already experienced with HDR, you can still find this to be a useful read. If you are new to HDR photography, this book should be among your fisrt choices. The explanation of HDR and the practical photographer-to-photographer advice excellent.
Strongly Recommended
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Mitch, I looked through our
Mitch, I looked through our largest bookstores on several occasions looking for a good book for HDR. I was looking for a book that would be particularly strong on tone mapping and which would explain well the various controls in Photomatix. This book was one of those I flipped through. I was dissapointed and I did not purchase. The upcoming software from NIK and the software from Unified Color seems a lot more intuitive and both packages seem to offer realistic real time previews of how the image will look tone-mapped into 16 bit space. I suspect that a purchase of these more intuitive software packages and training videos offered by these companies will make this book unnecessary.