The New York Times has an interesting article on HDR - High Dynamic Range photography. HDR allows photographers to combine multiple exposures to bring out the full range of tonal values in a scene, retaining detail in dark shadows as well as bright highlight areas. The results, like these mouthwatering images by photog Kris Kros, are sometimes hyper-realistic, making a photograph look like a hybrid photo-cum-painting. There are several programs for rendering HDR images, including Photoshop CS2. If you're interested in trying out the HDR features in Photoshop CS2, here are the basics:

The trick is to take several shots of the same scene at slightly different exposures and merge the images into one 32-bit HDR file in Photoshop (CS2 only). Shoot in RAW format. Be sure to use a tripod so your camera doesn't move between shots. Bracket exposures by changing shutter speed one stop for each shot, without changing your aperture. In Photoshop, choose File>Automate>Merge to HDR, and browse to your bracketed shots. Choose 32 bits as the bit depth if you want to retain all of the tonal information. Photoshop will merge the multiple exposures into one 32-bit file.

The merged image may look washed out at first because an HDR image contains a larger dynamic range than your monitor can display. You can adjust Photoshop's preview of the merged image by choosing View>32-bit Preview Options and adjusting Exposure, Gamma, and Highlight Compression settings there. These settings do not affect the image -- only the way it appears on your monitor. To adjust the image itself, choose Image>Adjustments>Exposure. In the Exposure dialog box, use the Exposure slider to adjust the highlights, the Offset slider to adjust shadows and midtones, and the Gamma slider to adjust , well, the gamma. Save the 32-bit file in Radiance (.hdr) format. If you want to manipulate the image further in Photoshop, convert it to 16 bits so you have access to more tools and features. You can print the 16-bit file, or convert it to 8-bit for printing.

Now that you Windows users have heard that there's a beta of Adobe Lightroom for you (a free download from Adobe), you're probably hungry for some Windows specific training. As usual, NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) is right on it. They've updated their Lightroom training page with some new videos that show the Windows version of Lightroom, including Matt Kloskowski's Intro to the Develop Module, Secrets of the Tone Curve, and Magic of Split-Toning. Mac users will benefit from these videos too, because Lightroom's settings are similar across the platforms.

And if you want to see what other users are saying about the Windows beta or post your own impressions, join in on Adobe's Lightroom Beta Windows discussion board.

The O'Reilly Network has taken the wraps off of Inside Adobe Lightroom, a new site featuring articles, a blog and a podcast covering Adobe's professional photo management app. Tips on color correction, adding music to slideshows, how to migrate images from iPhoto  and more are all on the menu, so swing by and find out how much you really didn't know about Lightroom.

[via Daring Fireball]

I came across another portfolio site that offers some before and after images exhibiting the power of Photoshop (mouse over the images to see the magic). What I like about this page is its author, Greg Apodaca, has presented a nice range of imagery, from model photography to product re-touching and image compositing. A few of his images include a clever re-creation of Photoshop's layers palette, and mousing over each layer will deconstruct the image to that particular element. Nice.

Adobe released a free Software Developer's Kit (SDK) for the Digital Negative Specification (DNG) this week in an effort to encourage further adoption of the DNG raw image format. The SDK gives camera manufacturers and software developers tools and information they need to incorporate DNG support into their products. You can download the SDK for Mac or Windows from the Adobe site.

DNG is an open standard raw format that Adobe introduced to avoid the uncertainty associated with camera and software manufacturers' proprietary raw formats. What does that mean? Let's say your camera produces raw files in a format that only the camera manufacturer's raw converter software can open. If the manufacturer stops making that software in the future, you could find yourself with lots of unusable files.

Adobe moved toward a solution to this problem by introducing the DNG format in 2004, and making it freely available to camera and software manufacturers. DNG files can be opened by the Adobe Camera Raw converter in Photoshop and by third-party software that incorporates DNG format. As the DNG format becomes more universally adopted by camera and software manufacturers, your raw photographs get a longer expected life. Adobe's new DNG SDK is one more step in that direction.

Jennifer Apple over at The Photoshop Blog posted a great tip for getting that perfect selection when you're having a tough time with other methods, possibly due to backgrounds or surrounding elements that are stumping Photoshop and its various selection tools.

Jennifer's idea is to give your selection tool of choice a helping hand by using a Levels or Curves adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer) to increase the image's contrast. Using an adjustment layer (instead of applying the changes directly) will allow you to preserve the image the way you want it, make the selection you need and then throw out or turn off (for later use) the layer in order to go on about your business.

This method is both a great technique and a prime example of the power of adjustment layers that should be incorporated into nearly every Photoshop user's toolbelt as soon as possible.

High dynamic range photography merges multiple exposures into one hyper-real image, and with such amazing results it's a wonder that I haven't been exposed to it before today. I'd like to extend a thank you to the guys over at Boing Boing who just linked me into the wonderful world of HDR through this great Flickr pool. I'll spare you the boring details and allow you to read up on it yourself here.

There are some great plugins for Photoshop that helps you achieve the effect, one is Photomatix which is offered as a stand alone program and also a Photoshop CS2 plugin. A free trial is available. For those of us who can't afford to drop more money into plugins, Photoshop CS2 offers 32-bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) support. A decent tutorial is available here. However the results may be a little harder to arrive at, see the Photomatix comparison site for a comparison.

Feel free to experiment and post your image into the Flickr group, link back in the comments so we can check it out!