"Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly."
- Arnold Edinborough
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HDR photography
Sunday, September 20, 2009 | Permalink

Back in February I made a blog post about HDR cameras. Since then a few things have happened. Pentax released their K-7, which is the first SLR with built-in HDR. It's taking the traditional approach of multiple exposure and consequently needs a lot of processing after shooting (12 seconds according to some sites). Recently Sony released the a500/550, which is both faster (2 seconds) and unlike K-7 has built-in image alignment which should allow for handheld HDR photography. Fujifilm also released the F70EXR, which is a cheaper variant of the F200EXR. Fujifilm is still the only vendor to use an actual HDR sensor and thus need no particular processing at all. All manufacturers are still only producing a final jpeg image unfortunately. Fujifilm would be in a position to offer a RAW format with HDR since they have it built into the sensor, whereas the other manufacturers could opt to use the EXR format. Anything that allows you to post-process the tonemapping would be great. But this is still early and I'm sure better solutions are around the corner and this is all a very exciting development.

After having been tempted for a while I finally pushed the order button and got myself an F200EXR. After having played with it for a while and learned how to best take advantage of the HDR feature I'm really loving it. And here's why:



The picture on the right has HDR enabled. The picture on the left is about what every other camera would produce. The pictures are taken at the same time with the same settings and no other post-processing was done other than resizing for the web.

I'm convinced that HDR will be the next big thing in photography.

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Sean Barrett
Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Do cameras actually output sRGB? I have no idea.

Humus
Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Well, the output in the form of a jpeg image is going to be in sRGB, like any normal image. I think some cameras can use another color profiles, but the difference wouldn't change much. I'm not sure what kind of response curve the average sensor has though. I would tend to think it's not linear, but more like a 2^(-k * light) curve or similar, like for film.

Overlord
Thursday, September 24, 2009

Well technically all light sensors are analog, usually they have a photosensitive surface and a form of capacitor or capacitive material.
If you increase the capacitance over area you increase the theoretical dynamic range.
All of this is pretty linear (save for the extremes and possibly part of the upper range) though i can't tell you how the A/D converter does things, but i imagine its spaced reasonably linear or as humus suggested.

And yes my camera can output AdobeRGB as well as sRGB and of cause raw, though the former is more or less useless.

mark
Sunday, September 27, 2009

in my opinion all camera's should already been hdr capable!
it's weird it's not developing really, Fuji is really the only one.

from a display perspective i understand, as tft displays are for 88% only 6bit panels why have a wider range image file for the mass market?

Scorpion
Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Norge ser ut som en elgitarr.

Humus
Tuesday, September 29, 2009

DU ser ut som en elgitarr!

Davros
Monday, October 5, 2009

"I'm really loving it. And here's why:"

Then you post 2 pictures that look more or less the same ???
what am i missing ?

Humus
Monday, October 5, 2009

Uhm, how about the sky? It's completely burnt out on the left.

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