In-camera HDR

mordor_74 wrote:

VisualFX wrote:

mordor_74 wrote:

HDR is called Smartrange in the samsung menu, if you are shooting jpg.

All sensor with 20mpx have a very good DR, you can just shot in raw and then arrange DR with hilight and shadows. I archive very good result with this method. Next step will be bracketing, a lot more of work and the major enancement will be less noise in the shadow but if the subject is not perfetcly stable you may loose some resolution.

SmartRange is different from the HDR option. SmartRange boosts midtones and stretches out the exposure. The HDR mode takes multiple exposures and combines them.

I wonder why everything should come to polemics here...

wiki says:

" high dynamic range (HDR) [is a] technique used in imaging and photography to reproduce a greater dynamic range of luminosity than is possible with standard digital imaging or photographic techniques."

This is the italian FAQ for Samsung NX:

http://www.samsung.com/it/support/skp/faq/865776

Samsung States:

"Smart Range is a feature that automatically corrects the loss of bright detail that can occur due to shading differences in the photo (see photo)."

In fact smart range captures a slightly underexposed image and then recover the shadows (just some of us will do in LR). You can see the result in the picture of the link. Obviously it is not the same result of a fully functional HDR process but this "halfway" (but still "a greater dynamic range" than the same picture taken without Smartrange!) result is the best thing you can get "incamera" from many samsung nx models.

Also what you describe as "HDR mode" is just one of the techinques that can be used to get an HDR image: stacking. Stacking was the most used tecnique before the coming of isoinvariant sensors and actual DR performances (12.0EV or more!). Now many photographer just use slides on LR with a single RAW frame. Since the sensor is isoinvariant the detail contained in shadow and hilights is almost the same than the same image captured under and overexposed. The main difference with the result of stacked images is that the stacked images can be used as noisemask to make a cleaner image but on the other side the bracketing shots may have differences (camera moving, changes in the subject like people moving the wind moving a tree) that can compromise the final result in term of sharpness.

So, is smart range a good option then?