HDR used properly is appropriate for photojournalism, says Unified Color's Omvik

It is essential to know why HDR exists in the first place! Historically photographers have been seeking it ever since the medium was invented. No film and no camera (even today) is capable of registering the whole dynamic range of a scene. As a result phtographic seeing has become paradigmatic and many beleive that cannot be changed. But that paradigm is constantly changing. First from BW to color then from analog to digital. The film industry produces HDR by using lighting thus reducing the dynamic range to what the film can capture. The same is done in studios with flashes. The reporter uses fill flash to bring down the range. Hypolite Bayard used multiple exposures in the 1800s. Ansel Adams created his zone system to capture more range. Countless experiments with emulsion/exposure/development variables sought exactly that - more (High) exposure (dynamic) range- without having to appeal to artifacts (artificial illumination). Healthy is debate and experiment unhealthy to prohibit.

Αll in good measure...

Sean Elliot simply doesn't understand the technical side of digital photography. No photo, film or digital, is a totally realistic representation of what we see. HDR along with tone mapping, when done conservatively, can produce a more realistic image when compared to what we see. The process can, like any process, be used to create surreal images as well and probably that is what Mr Elliot was thinking about.

Being against HDR photography is like being against colour photography. Why elevate a technical limitation to documentary truth?

What we have here is a confusion between editorial photography and photojournalism. The case described in this article is editorial photography, which is not strict documentarianism; it's a photo whose purpose is to supplement the material, set a tone and add to its impact. It doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with the material.

Documentary photojournalism can be said to be a subset of editorial photography, but its purpose is to tell a story or show a detail that can't be said as succinctly with the written material.

There is room for both in a journalistic publication. Your readers should be smart enough to understand what is what.

It's beyond me how blending together several shots of the same scene taken milliseconds apart can be considered as some kind of cardinal sin against photojournalist dogma. In fact when done right HDR actually reveals more detail present in "reality" and closer to how the human eye sees it in a high contrast scene.

Anybody can explain?

The fear is that a Pandora box will be opened if HDR processing is allowed in photojournalism. I believe this fear is not justified.

HDR is not retouching as in using Photoshop to remove visually intrusive power lines from a landscape photograph or to remove skin imperfections on a person's face.

As long as the of HDR is use to best reproduce what the photographer saw in REALITY when he or she pressed the shutter release, I don't see any reason to ban HDR from good photojournalism practices. It would be like saying the use of a certain film developper "was cheating" because it provided better details in the shadows or in the highlights.

We're far from the awful examples of very bad (both in the technical and ethical sense) photo retouching that are often seen in a UK newspaper I won't dare to name for this piece of crap is so unethical it's not worth being used as anything but bathroom tissue (those among you who read PhotoshopDisasters will know which newspapers I'm talking about).

Very simply, HDR makes up for deficiencies in sensor technology. When sensors with greater tonal range are developed, it will not be necessary any more. So I have no issue with HDR in photojournalism, as the image is not being manipulated in any way, just processed to maximize existing information.

Ansel Adam's zone system essentially created HDR photos.

There's HDR and then there's extreme HDR. Like any tool it can be abused, over used or used incorrectly.

I suppose HDR has its' place but it is not my cup of tea. If you want your photos to look like cartoons, then its great!

"used properly" !!! No problem with that.

HDR can be great, and in my mind it should not even be noticeable unless one wants a non-natural look for example for illustrations or advertising.

Unfoirtunately HDR is too often misused.

The real question is: Are you MOVING pixels, or just manipulating them, i.e. changing contrast, sharpness, saturation, HDR etc (which gets done anyway in the digital process from the moment you press the shutter). If you're moving pixels, you're adding to or removing elements from the picture, which is unacceptable in photojounalism, except where you want to illustrate some point, in which case you have to keep the reader informed of what you've done and why.

What are the current PJ rules on altering brightness and contrast. I vaguely remember a PJ getting fired or reprimanded for altering b & c and making a scene of a fire or something similar look more ominous. Clearly HDR can do that too. It would seem that some HDR should be permissible and the PJ industry needs to define what is and is not permissible.

Most HDR I see look unnatural whereas I rarely get that feeling from looking at a photo-journalistic shot even if it is shot on in black and white.

I think this is because the HDR shots tend to lack any deep shadows at all. They tend to appear grey and dark shadows play an important part in making a photograph appear realistic in my opinion.

I am not talking about the poster paint results that can result from HDR which are horrible anyway but when it is applied more subtly to try and just enhance DR. Most times it doesn't need enhancing at all.

I'm not making a living taking pictures yet I'm miffed by the mild response. This guy Elliot is supposed to be on the photographers' side. Newspapers lost a lot of business to the Internet and W. Post appears alert to advances in technology and wants to use it.

You cannot ban technology, only manage it. It is the editor's job to set the guidelines. Elliot is dumping "the problem" on HDR technology and has no clue or does not care where his constituents lunch is coming from few months from now. At a minimum Elliot is incompetent to see the opportunities and pulls the proverbial defeat from the jaws of victory.

I think every editor should require submitted photos to have an accompanying 10 sec or so sound track taken along with the photo. It could sure make the paper's Internet extension come more to life.

Readers of the W. Post got a technical HDR explanation. But HDR also improves the signal-to-noise ratio. The noise comes from the sensor and might be removed because it is random.

It's curious that many of those arguing against HDR are doing so from a standpoint of ignorance as to what it actually means. It does NOT mean removing wrinkles or warts from ageing movie stars, nor adding a child's teddy bear to the foreground of a photo of Fukishima - it simply means compressing a greater range of contrast (from very dark to very light) into a picture, to make it CLOSER in appearance to what the human eye (and brain) can see. And ANYTHING that makes photos MORE TRUE TO REALITY is to be praised and supported.

Brian

HDR is a method for processing exposure, not manipulating the subject of the image in any way. The idea that multiple images are somehow more of a manipulation is rubbish. We're just gathering different exposures of the same image. It's still a single image. Nothing is added or removed. Any misunderstanding otherwise is a bit silly at best and displays a lack of understanding.

The fact that some of us use these same HDR techniques in artistic extremes should not be an excuse to fail to understand the process and on how it can be used to create a more natural image just as easily. In the same way we can add saturation, contrast or make an image monotone, we can now adjust dynamic range to make an image more natural or carve out some extreme we also like.

Reality is 3D with time, movement, smells and sounds. It's the wind blowing through your hair and the leaves rustling. You are not going to faithfully capture that with your Nikon camera regardless of Paul Simon's song.

The truth is one. The lies are many.
Regardless of the medium used, be it words or pixels or whatever.

As Galen Rowell correctly points out in his book "Inner Game of Outdoor Photography", all pictures are illusions, created from an image of reality manipulated by our own human visual system. "A photograph can never exactly replicate the already interpretive image 'right there before our eyes' that we assume represents an objective reality".
HDR (or not HDR) how can anyone be sure of what was the image really looking like in the eyes of the photographer?
If the mission of a journalist photographer is to communicate visually as close as possible the perceived 'reality' in front of him, he needs to have access to all the tools he judges necessary to help him. I believe HDR helps in this regard, because a single digital media capture cannot replicate the sophisticated interpretation of our own visiual system.

Newspaper used black and white pictures years ago, which greatly altered our colorful world. Were they cheating?

beyond the particularity of an HDR processed image in this case (of secondary importance to me at least), this story brings up a much larger and more relevant issue which is "what is truthful and what not" in photography. If we start from today's almost universally accepted notion that all photography is subjective, because it is a partial view and a biased choice of timing, framing and even lighting of a given situation, it is always hard to cast the first stone and draw the line between true and false. It could be a very interesting debate, and in my opinion we should be able to keep it going at a high level, put it where it belongs which is human perception of reality and not trying to draw the line on technicalities. As a final thought (to this message) it appears to me that communications today is a two-way road. and if the Post publishes a hard to believe HDR image on its cover, the readers will decide if they will question or not this Newspaper's credibility.

I think that HDR is being overused and when applied, it is overcooked.

The sample posted in this article is a clear example when HDR was most likely not neccessary at all. I would not mind if there were strong shadows or white clouds or snow, ot the sun in the sky. I seriously doubt that the dynamic range of the scene was greater than 8 EV, a value that a properly exposed RAW can capture with all details. Also I do not like the colors, both greens and blues/cyans, they are "radioactive". The image should have been processed in LAB mode with a stronger global contrast on the lightness channel (local contrast is fine - details are clear). And overall with less saturation and especially the green channel should be a bit darker. That is my opinion, your taste may be different (or your monitor). Even when I am doing HDRs, I try to keep them as natural as possible. It is very simple to get an surrealistic, painterly look. But it is much harder to get a well balanced image with natural look.

Maybe they should also limit the lenses and sensor size. Never heard of a human eye with great Bokeh. No more full frame cameras with F1.2 lenses. We should really get rid of all lenses aside from 48mm or whatever the human eye is. Maybe ban black and white pictures. Destroy all these "fakes" taken in the past.

This argument can get quite out of hand.

Ansel Adams' technique required pre-visualization. It was not an attempt at impartial documentation, as the tools were inadequate to that task (and still are). He had a vision to distill into one frame what a person standing in the same spot might need minutes or hours, or years of viewing the same scene to encompass.

Whether it's silver halide or CCD, creating an analogy of a scene is all we can ever hope for. It will always be a representation, not a copy of the original.

There will always be a difference between pictorial and documentary news photography - Ansel Adams and Robert Capa. Publications use both types.

The scene in question is editorial eye candy, to draw readers to the story. It was not documenting a news story. But had there been crash victims in deep shadow while a wreck blazed in the background? They'd have done whatever necessary to make both visible. The point is not to capture the "truth" of technology's limitations, but the "truth" of the event.

This photograph is a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object. It isn't 'real', it is a representation of reality. What's the big deal ?

Well I wouldn't say you see in HDR, you see sort of like a movie though. Instead of everything just being a single snapshot spanning a fraction of a second (or even a few seconds) it's constant, persistent vision. What makes it seem like HDR is the fact that you can actually only focus on things in your direct cone of vision and your eye can compensate for changes in light (exposure shift) very fast.

So when you're looking in the shadows you can see everything because only the really dark area is in your cone of vision; when you look up into the bright sky your eyes quickly tighten their aperture (iris) to properly adjust for the brighter light.

Sometimes it's not fast enough if your eyes aren't ready or you transition to swiftly.

So it's similar to HDR and your eyes are definitely more advanced than any camera. I don't have a problem with HDR, I don't consider the combining of otherwise unaltered images comparable to "any other digital manipulation." Color/Contrast is trivial.

I want Velvia banned because because the warmth and richness of the colours it records are not an accurate reproduction of those visible to the photographer at the time the shot was taken.

Isn't using HDR just like using dodge, burn or switching paper contrast grades in the darkroom?

HDR is fine. I think there should be a warning when a picture is published in 2D as opposed to the more natural 3D. :)

He has a good point, of course. Our eyes, in combination with our brain, can interpret much larger dynamic range than the camera can. So in a way, our eyes/brain are doing HDR for us, in real time.

It is quite common that I take a photo, and then feel that it is not what I saw with my own eyes. And quite often because the camera cannot process as wide range of shades.

This is a dilemma - the picture in the Washington Post is not actually 'a news event' and the manipulation is clearly mentioned - and let's be perfectly honest, the HDR aspect quite subtley applied, to the point that many people wouldn't have realised it was HDR unless it was mentioned. It could easily have been a single shot with tweaks to contrast and saturation - and is that wrong/disallowed?

I think that if it is a 'news event' then manipulation outside of contrast/exposure corrections should not be permitted.

As this particular shot is 'illustrative', then perhaps it is ok - just as long as it doesn't become a common ocurrance...

And how do you police this exactly - definitely a dilemma!

I think the problem with HDR is that people who use it overdo the processing. Whilst I agree that properly use HDR processing can make the picture look more natural, as seen by the human eye, the fact that most HDR pictures are over-processed, over-saturated and over-sharpened gives the process a bad name. You only have to look at published pictures in the photographic press to see what I mean.

An idea that I have raised in the past is, why can't camera manufacturers build an extra process into their algorithms when processing the data from the sensor, to evaluate the light hitting different parts of the sensor, and processing the data so that the exposure is equalised. For example, in a landscape picture, if the light hitting the top half of the sensor is brighter than the light hitting the bottom half, under-process the top half to equalise the result of the processing of the bottom half. I am sure this is not beyond the bounds of possibility.