When the BBC announced their “In pictures: Landscape photo of the year 2009″ winners, readers were up in arms at what they perceived to be pictures that were heavily manipulated digitally using a technique known as High Dynamic Range or HDR.
HDR is a technique where the photographer takes a number of shots of the same scene at different exposures to ensure that shadows, midtones and highlights are accurately preserved. These shots are then merged together in post processing to produce one photograph with seemingly impossible dynamic range.
HDR has long been a technique reserved for professional photographers who produced incredible landscape photographs that the amateur photographer could never seem to reproduce no matter how hard they tried. And even when the secret finally came out in print, the process of manually merging these pictures in Photoshop was just too time consuming and difficult for the average user. It was not until special HDR software such as Photomatix came out that HDR exploded onto the amateur photographer scene.
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