Canon just won't make us HDR shooters happy.

They instist on the ridiculous 3-frame bracketing, even on the brand new EOS 5D Mark II. Apparently they consider HDR photography a serious pro feature, and keep larger brackets exclusive to the flagship EOS 1Ds. How lame is that? The rest of us have to refer to Kirt's Cheat Sheet to shoot several overlapping brackets, or carry a laptop for shooting tethered.

But fear not - Steve Chapman has just invented HDR bracketing in style!

Using a Nintendo DS and a custom-built interface cartridge you can fire any set of exposure bracket. It also features a timelapse timer, a darkroom-safe nightvision skin, and sound-activated "clapper mode". This is software such an ingenious idea, because the DS is essentially a low power consumption, fully graphical interface computer with a touchscreen and a microphone. And it runs Super Mario Kart. And it's way cheaper than the iphone. What could be better suited for remote controlling your camera?

If you want this sweet thing to be yours, I suggest you'd shoot Steve an email right away.
Read all about this project on Steve's blog.

Still looking for the perfect companion volume to the HDRI Handbook?

Well, it might be just around the corner.

Jack Howard, well-renowned editor at PopPhoto and long-time friend of HDRLabs just wrote a new book on HDRI. It's very slick looking, very rocky-nooky, very professional photography. And it's called Practical HDRI, hinting at Jack's hands-on approach of teaching.

It's out just now, pre-ordering from Amazon will ensure you get a copy as soon as it's coming down the delivery pipe.

The sIBL of the month is a real gem from my personal collection: the milky way in it's full glory. So get your shiny space ship ready and render away to new frontiers.

Also, there is now a German forum section, after I realized that the German version of the HDRI Handbook became pretty popular. Not quite sure how many readers of the Czech HDRI Handbook are around here, but so far I haven't had any request for a Czech forum....

Next stop: Photokina

Photokina is about to happen, and it will be great this year.

Nikon just got the new D90 out, with 24p HD movie mode and the low-noise CMOS sensor known from the D700 and D3. Bracketing is limited to 3 frames, though. Personally I will wait for DX-sized CMOS sensor to come to the successor of the D300... Also new are the Pentax 200D and the Canon 50D. There's even rumor of a Canon 5D Mark II, and Photokina sounds like just the right launch event.


I will hold a workshop at Photokina as part of the fotoespresso series, organized by my publisher dpunkt. Seats are going fast, considering that this is a super slick deal: For 99 Euros you get a copy of the HDRI Handbook, a daypass for Photokina, and all the personal tutoring I can cram into three hours. The workshop will probably be split 70/30 into a presentation and a hands-on problem solving part where I'll try to answer your questions.
Don't miss the show, sign up here!

When you want to see what's really happening on the frontier of imaging technology, you'd have to watch some technical paper sessions. The smartest people from universities all over the world present their latest research, and you get a glimpse of what's coming - way before it's incorporated into a product.

It's actually quite funny how HDR images are often used as test material for all kinds of new imaging algorithms, as if HDRI would already be the standard. That's how far these guys are ahead. However, I would like to highlight some new tonemapping approaches. Developers - please pay close attention, users - please refrain from drooling all over your keyboard.

Lischinski's Edge-Preserving Decompositions

The most important part in a Local TMO is the separation of different detail levels. It's usually done in a preprocess, before you can adjust any settings. This is the part where small-scale details are isolated from large-scale contrasts, and the quality of this isolation has a huge impact on the tonemapping result. If it's done poorly, you get halos.

Most programs use a bilateral filter for this extraction, which used to be the best way to preserve hard edges while smoothing global lighting changes. If you're a Photomatix user, you've seen this decomposition at work:



Now a project group at The Hebrew University, in collaboration with Microsoft Research, has developed a new method with significant improvements. They call it the Weighted Least Squares (WLS) Optimization, and it does a much better job at preserving edges and thus suppressing halos.

Check out this project's website for example results, the full paper, and some code. Do not miss the movie presentation!

Tonemapping Quality Evaluation

How do you judge a tonemapping result?

Isn't it purely a matter of taste? Can this be quantified at all?

Sure it can. You just have to ask the right questions. Quality evaluation is not about 'good' or 'bad' results. Instead, it tells you how much of the dynamic range got lost in the conversion, how much details you managed to extract, and where halo artifacts got introduced. And when you can clearly name a problem, you can go ahead and fix it.

Tunç Ozan Aydın from the Max-Planck-Institute presented a new algorithm, that has all the answers. It can compare an HDR image with a tonemapped LDR image and clearly maps out 3 problem areas:

Different tonemapping operators, compared via Aydın’s new image metrics.

• Loss (green) - When there are details in the HDR that didn't make it into the LDR. Typically, this happens when the tonemapper compressed the range to much or clipped details.
• Amplification (blue) - When the tonemapping result shows contrasts that were not just barely visible in the HDR. Sometimes a desired effect of detail enhancements, not necessarily a negative property of the result.
• Reversal (red) - This identifies areas where a contrast in the LDR is the opposite from what was seen in the HDR. Should point out halos and put up warning signs of surreal appearance.

You can check out several examples in an interactive online viewer.

In a real-world application I can see such a colored overlay very useful for tonemapping previews. Kind of like the clipping warnings in Photoshop or Lightroom, that mark clipped pixels in red. The algorithms presented could also be used to create an iterative tonemapping operator, that automatically minimizes artifacts.


It certainly has some room left for improvements. I wish it would be better in detecting halo artifacts, the arch enemies of every tonemapper. Clearly, halos are a quality measure that should be accounted for.

Read more about this on the Project's Website or evaluate your own images by uploading them to the Quality Assessment Web Interface.

Display-Adaptive Tonemapping

This is also from Max-Planck-Institute, this time in collaboration with Sharp. They call it a new tonemapping operator, but I'd call it a whole new way to think about tonemapping.

If were shopping for a new display lately, you might have noticed that contrast ratios are all over the place. They range from 1:60 for ePaper over wallet-friendly 1:10.000 LCDs, up to 1: 3 Million in high-end plasma screens. If you see a wall of 20 TVs is a store, you see 20 different images - even though they show the same channel.

The idea is now to make the tonemapping display-aware. So the all images are perceptually the same, or at least as close as the display tech can show it. And then take it to the next level, and even compensate for the ambient lighting conditions in the room.

Admittedly, this research is of limited use for us consumers right now. But it clearly shows where HDR is heading.

You can check out the paper, watch the demo movie, and if you know how to compile things you can even play with the tonemapper yourself in the latest pfstools package.

This is only border-lining our HDR topic, but it's just too awesome to go unmentioned.




Not that any of these example clips would be impossible to create today. But they require a lot of manual work from a skilled VFX artist. In fact, the "We shot it wrong - you fix it!" category is the bread and butter of the VFX industry today. It's tedious, uninspiring, and sometimes even aggravating work. Any help from a push-button automatic is welcome. Currently Mokey is the closest production-ready tool, and at EdenFX we make extensive use of it. Mixed in with After Effects, Fusion, and some 3d reconstruction in Lightwave, we get stuff done. But it's nowhere nearly as automatic as in the video shown above.

Read more on this amazing new algorithm on the project's homepage. Especially the Spacetime Fusion technique described is a required reading for ever developer making tonemapping software - could be helpful for making After Effects plugins. (hint hint nudge nudge)

Blochi