I made my first HDR last night and that’s pretty easy and interesting. According to Wikipedia’s explanation, HDR is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques, and the effect is really really amazing!

Here’s the original image saved in the RAW format.

As you can see, this photo is a bit overexposed in the sky so that the sky is not blue anymore, this is because of the high contrast in the scene and here’s where HDR fits in. Now let’s see the corresponding HDR result.

Wow, much better! The sky is blue again and the image is more vivid now although it’s also a little unrealistic. I made this picture by only one original RAW file and used Lightroom to generate two additional copies with different exposures, then exported these three pictures to Photomatix to generate a HDR image and re-imported it back to Lightroom to do final post-processing, done. It’s pretty simple yet very powerful, just give it a try if you will.