HDR - High Dynamic Range Compression - a Photoshop plugin

HDR - High Dynamic Range Compression - A Photoshop Plug-in

Brighten dark areas and darken lights in high contrast photos. Use it for shadow illumination. Make you photos match what the eye sees in
nature by revealing what's hidden in dark areas. Shift the images entire dynamic range or stretch the range to perfect white and black point.
Our method does not create halos. Also this plug-in does not require several exposures of the same image, but works from a single image.
Windows version is for all versions of Photoshop, Elements, Fireworks, Paint Shop Pro, Corel Draw,
Illustrator and other software that supports Photoshop plug-ins. See list.
Mac version is for all versions of Photoshop and Elements and all OS versions.

Dynamic Range Compressor plug-in - Tutorial

Benefits
of the plug-in

Basic
controls

Illuminate shadows without overexposing lights.

Darken lights without darkening shadows.
Apply compression as a graduated effect. Full in one side, none in the other.
Master all aspects of dynamic range like offset and white- and black point stretching.

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Products overview

This is the Dynamic Range plug-ins control panel. Click on the image to
enlarge. The control panel and preview area can be changed by
dragging the edges.

See Windows plug-in

1. Range Compression - darks and lights

2. Graduated effect
3. Range adjustment - offset and black point
4. Overall effect and saturation

Original
Darks
Darks & lights

Tutorial as pdf

The Dynamic Range Compression plug-in works with these image modes:
8 & 16 bit / channel: RGB, Grayscale, Duotone, Lab, CMYK, Multichannel.

The filter has four groups of controls:

Examples:

Tutorial

See Mac plug-in

Download Win plug-ins
Download Mac plug-ins
Download tutorials

The Dynamic range

Compression plug-in is
indispensable for making
high contrast photos look
like what the scene really
looked like when you took
the picture. Original is
leftmost.

HDR - High Dynamic Range Compression - a Photoshop plugin

What is HDR - High Dynamic Range - and why is it a problem?

High Dynamic
Dynamic range is the span from the darkest value to the brightest value. Now this sounds simple enough - but the sensors of the eye and the camera
Range (HDR)
and the scanner are not equal. This means details in darks and lights are not registered equally by the eye, camera and scanner.
and its problems

The problem is that the camera or scanner is not as sensitive to the entire dynamic range as the human vision is. In a scene where the eye will
perceive details in both the light and dark areas at the same time, the camera or scanner will only be able to capture one end while rendering the
other as an underexposed or overexposed mass. Below is a classic example of this: When exposing the scenery correctly the stone fence gets
underexposed.

Original

Filtered to bring out the stone fence without changing the contrast of the
branches or the scenery.
We used the Graduated Effect option of the plug-in to filter the lower part
of the image and leave the upper part intact.

HDR - High Dynamic Range Compression - a Photoshop plugin

Compressing lights only

High dynamic
range
compression of
lights

You will find that most of the discussions about correcting HDR (high dynamic range) images is concerned with how to compress the shadows and
expand visibility into the dark areas. However, images can improve considerably by compressing the lights.

Original.
One might impulsively think this picture needs some sort of shadow
illumination. But no, we need to compress the lights. Illuminating the
shadows would destroy the impression of being in the shade under a pier.

After compressing the lights only.

These are the settings used:

Now, this improves the picture a lot (perhaps it's overdone, but this is for the sake of illustration). There is one thing that stands out now: the negative
edge line along the edge of the pillar. This line is there either because the photographer used Photoshop's unsharp mask to sharpen the image or
because he had set his digital camera to sharpen his pictures (you can see it in the original also). You should be aware that all such defects become
enhanced when expanding the dynamic range. If the photographer had used Power Retouche to sharpen the image, this would not have been a
problem because Power Retouche Sharpness Editor does not create these edge lines.
In any case, the lesson to learn from this is that you should always sharpen as a final retouch. So turn off the automatic sharpening in your digital
camera, - this also because these hardware sharpenings are always the most basic forms of unsharp mask around.

HDR - High Dynamic Range Compression - a Photoshop plugin

Shadow Illumination
Compressing shadows can of course be used for shadow illumination.
The following image shows how much information actually resides in
underexposed areas.
But you should be aware that any noise in the darks (and there is much)
will be greatly enhanced.
You could illumine the shadows even more than what we suggest below,
but one should respect the original image. Trying to over do editing will
always invite nasty side effects like noise enhancement and exaggerated
variations where no variations should be.
Original

Corrected

The Controls
Range
compression

First group lets you compress either shadows or lights.

Shadow compression is sometimes called shadow illumination.
Compression Factor boosts the effect of the compression.

Range
adjustment

Offset will add (or subtract) a given value from every pixel of the image, thus
brightening or darkening the impression, but not changing the dynamic range
by compression or expansion.
Black Point will stretch the dynamic range down towards black, leaving the
highlights as they are, but progressively deepening the darker colors. Turn on
Black Alert, or watch the histogram, when using this slider, so you don't overkill
the darkest areas.
Shadow Depth does the same in principle, but it leaves everything brighter
than Shadow Threshold alone. Thus you can specify the threshold from where
you will expand the dark range to the black point.
The last group lets you adjust saturation and also adjust the effect by mixing
more or less with the original.

Overdone - be careful

HDR - High Dynamic Range Compression - a Photoshop plugin

Graduated effect
These controls are common for many of the Power Retouche plug-ins. Using
graduated effect will cause the filter to apply it's filtering at full strength in one
side of the image and then fade the effect out towards the other side. You can
change direction by right clicking the preview. Midpoint will shift the balance
between how large an area will be filtered at full strength and how much will
have a faded out effect. Contrast will change the acceleration and spread of
the fade-out.

In this example we applied a graduated effect towards the bottom, setting midpoint to the edge of the gray clouds. This retouch brought light into the
underexposed foreground, bringing it forward, without altering the sunset.

Histogram and Color values

Histogram
Pixel data

These controls are common to most of the Power Retouche plug-ins. The
displayed histogram will be for the area in the preview. You can choose
between individual color channels, all color channels or luminance.
The color picker allows you to pick a point (pixel) in the preview and get some
interesting data about it. The d-values tell how much the pixel is changed in
percent. L tells the luminance value (brightness) of the pixel.

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