Waiting on the HDR

So c'mon Phil, where's your first HDR ? we's waitin.

I had a play earlier but I'm not sure why they are HDR ?

To me it's just adjusting the brightness / contrast rather than selecting the bits I want from each picture.

An HDR is combining an over exposed, an underexposed and a normal photograph. Sometimes more than 3 pics make up an HDR.

Because you are combining the three, you are able to get all of the detail in one picture that you would normally need to see the three pics for. For example...my church door HDR , you wouldn't normally be able to see the outside and the inside of the church door in a single piccy because it was taken on a sunny day ...the inside would be in darkness (does that help at all?)

Very well said Mel, I'm no expert but I must say it takes a lot of the donkey work out of editing a pic on PS.

Mels right Phill. To get the correct exposure on some images, you may have to underexpose certain areas aka shadow details, HDR allows you to expose or the highlighs and the shadows in different shots and merge them all together so there is no loss of detail

http://www.yophotographer.com/page.php?t=357

I understand that (see other thread)

I used 3 vaiations of a single photo.

One with a correct sky but very dark foreground.

One with the correct foreground but a burned out sky

One sort of in the middle with correct middle ground

What I want is the Sky from the 1st - the foreground from the 2nd and the middle ground from the third.

All it seems to do is average out the 3 giving me what is pretty much the equivelent of the 'middle' picture.

Are you using photomatix Phil? There are loads of different variables on that programme, it is just a case of tweaking and twiddling until you get the effect that you are after Combine the 3 pics first and then tone map ...

No I'm using the free thing as per the other thread.