Bring your old photos' back to life by tone mapping individual images. Free online HDR trials.

      You cannot create true HDR photographs’ from single pictures however using HDR software to tone map individual prints, you can bring new life into your old photographs. As you can see by the examples on the right, the tone mapped photos’ appear to pop off the page as compared to the originals. Tone mapping even single pictures brings your photographs’ to a level that closely resembles what your eyes saw rather than the scene your DSLR camera captured.

      The photos on the right only took me about fifteen minutes to recreate with the individual tone mapping function in Photomatix. Photomatix retails for ninety-nine dollars but there are coupons on many photography websites, I paid eighty-four dollars for mine. There is also free software such as Luminance that you can download to accomplish similar effects but after many trials and a lot of frustration I decided that investing in Photomatix was the best option.

      As I am not writing this as a sales pitch I would encourage you to check out the options for HDR software as there are many more on the market. The above was just an explanation of what I discovered worked best for my own applications.

      I invested a lot of time and money in film photography many years ago. There were months that I spent more money purchasing and developing film than I earned while in the army so now with a DSLR I am elated to be able to take thousands of pictures without spending any money at all.

      If you haven’t tried HDR yet I would strongly encourage anyone to invest some time with it. Download some free software or a thirty day trial and experiment. After having read hundreds of tutorials and step-by-step HDR guides online I discovered the best way to learn HDR was to just play with all the various settings myself. Therefore I won’t bore you with the technical aspects of detail enhancers, exposure fusions, and tone mapping. Give them a try and most important of all, have fun!

     Keeping it simple true HDR, high dynamic range, photos require taking a series of the same shot with different exposures.  I typically use three exposures, one normal, one two EV above and one two EV below for outdoor shots such as landscapes. Indoors with bright backlight from windows or any composition that has a lot of range between light and dark will require more exposures.  Always use aperture priority and the lowest ISO you can, typically 100.  I would strongly recommend using a tripod although most software also contains fixes for hand held shots. Also using a cable release or your camera’s timer function will produce much sharper results.

     Tone mapping some of your individual existing prints will help you greatly as you will have a better understanding of the process when you begin to shoot true HDR as well as bringing life into your old pictures.