HDR with RAW

Hi all, This seems like it should be obvious or at least easily findable but perhaps my Googling is shoddy! I have a K1ii and I was trying the HDR function shooting RAW. I shot a shot (the top one in the attached) with no HDR and the bottom one with HDR and it shot three images and took a while to blend them. It looks a lot more HDR on the back of the camera. I take it into Exposure X5 and it just looks identical. All the HDRness is lost. It looks right in XNView (screenshot added).

Do I have to use Silkypix to do the edits while retaining the HDR look?

Thanks!

Phil

Doesn't the in-camera HDR function only output a JPG ?

PeterPentax wrote:

Phil_Rose wrote:

Thanks. Do you know what editors can handle them?

It is often just as good to make a raw capture exposing for the highlight regions and then bring out the shadows in PP. This avoids the need for HDR.

Yes, this is what I do, with a single image. I use the HDR tool in Silkypix, it works well for the majority of cases except of course the most extreme dynamic range.

Usually HDR means higher than what camera can do with a single photo. Why call something HDR, if it is normal performance? Decent dynamic range has been there for several years and little improvement since then. HDR is not the same as lightening shadows strongly with post-processing which either produce noisy mess or the scene has low contrast which is not really HDR either.

The main reason for HDR and HDRish post-processing confusion is that many displays have low dynamic range or are very small to make the difference between HDR and fake HDR:

Fotoni wrote:

Usually HDR means higher than what camera can do with a single photo. Why call something HDR, if it is normal performance? Decent dynamic range has been there for several years and little improvement since then. HDR is not the same as lightening shadows strongly with post-processing which either produce noisy mess or the scene has low contrast which is not really HDR either.

The main reason for HDR and HDRish post-processing confusion is that many displays have low dynamic range or are very small to make the difference between HDR and fake HDR:

I am not sure you are right. I only think HDR means mapping a high dynamic range image to a smaller dynamic range, matching the output medium. If the original comes from 1, 2, 3 or more shots does not really matter.

But sure, if the camera has an HDR mode it usually means taking three images.

Everyone does HDR a little differntly - a diffent mappping of a high DR image to a jpg 8 bit. By HDR effect, i tink we usually mean that local adjustments are made to brighter and darker areas of the image, a bit like dodging and burning.

That said, if you like the Pentax flavour of HDR, make sure you save a jpg in camera. I've noticed that these are pretty good in some cases, and the K1ii will auto align the 3 images, giving much sharper results that some raw developers *coughlightroom*.

Here's one, in camera HDR was better than what i managed in LR. Maybe my LR skills need tweaking?

I am not sure why anyone would want the 'HDR look' - that usually means that something has been overdone. If the camera is already capturing the full dynamic range of a scene in one shot, surely a natural-looking 'HDR' shot shouldn't look any different.

This has probably been pointed out already, but Lightroom is one of the easiest possible ways of achieving HDR. Just fire off three bracketed shots, and LR blends them in moments, including alignment - and will save them as a DNG image. Much more control than doing it in the camera.