HDR from a single RAW

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About HDR from a single RAW

To get the best from HDR (High Dynamic Range) images one should really plan ahead and use bracketed exposures right from the camera.

Sometimes however this is not possible, such as in action shots, or perhaps you merely wish to rescue a shot that has under or overexposed areas that can't be corrected by other means. If you shoot in RAW, as I do, you can create bracketed exposures from a single RAW file and use these to produce HDR images. Perhaps not as good as HDRs planned and executed from start to finish but certainly good enough to rescue a shot you like that suffers from exposure problems.

The talented lightpainter has shown, with this image, that it is even possible to produce a good HDR image when all you have to work from is a single JPEG.

This group is for those HDR images that you have produced from a single photograph you have taken, whether RAW, TIFF or JPEG. Photographs by other people that you have tone mapped are NOT welcome, and may be deleted without warning.

While I'm not a supporter of groups requiring posted images to have specific tags, I am using the tag hdr:single_raw for my own photos, so if you would like to use a tag to identify your shots, perhaps use that so we all use a common tag.

You may post up to 10 images in the group pool. The idea of limiting the total number you can submit is that you continually refresh the images you have in the pool. When you have a new image that you think is better than some you already have in the pool and you are already at the maximum, choose an older one you think is not as good as the new one and remove it, after which you will be able to post the new one.