A lens of approximately 15mm full-frame equivalent (10mm for APS-C).Most cameras can only shoot 3 brackets with 2 EV spacing, or 5 brackets with 1 EV spacing. It also needs to be able to shoot a minimum of 7 exposure brackets spaced by 2 EVs.A camera that can shoot in raw and has full manual control.While it’s perfectly possible to create an HDRI with almost any camera (including the one in your phone), in order to get a good result that is unclipped, without major lens artifacts, seams or color issues, and in any situation… you’ll need some fairly specific camera gear: The process of shooting an HDRI is quite simple in theory, but a number of technological limitations and avenues for human error make it a bit tricky the first few times. With that out the way, we can actually start making an HDRI! Step 1: Shooting Those brighter-than-white regions that our monitors can’t display are actually the most important part as they emit the most light. Being able to see all parts of a pair of images at once, including bright areas that our monitors otherwise could not display, makes it a lot easier to stitch them together or notice any seams between them, but in the end we actually want a pure 32-bit high dynamic range image that has not been tonemapped in order to produce the most realistic lighting and reflections. This has the effect of making it look more natural (our brain does this all the time in real life), and is what most photographers refer to as an HDR photo.įor us, this is not the desired final result though, merely a useful tool to make our stitching process easier. Tonemapping – taking a high dynamic range image (which may have areas that appear completely white on your monitor but are actually brighter than white) and adjusting each area of it so that everything appears well exposed – darkening the brightest parts and brightening the darkest parts.Stitching a panorama when we can’t see all the parts of our images is hard, so to make things easier to see we can do some tonemapping. Our monitors can’t display this higher dynamic range image, they don’t show anything brighter than “white” (RGB=255). When merged together, taking the best-exposed parts of each one, they create a single image with a much higher dynamic range. Exposure bracket – a set of photos from an identical point of view with increasing or decreasing brightness.So in order to capture the complete dynamic range, we use exposure bracketing. A photo of an overcast sky has a low dynamic range, while a photo that includes both the bright sun on a clear day and the entrance to a dark cave has a potentially high dynamic range.Ĭameras usually can’t capture all this high dynamic range in a single shot – the sun will be completely over exposed, or the dark cave will have so much noise/grain you won’t be able to discern any details inside of it. Dynamic range – The measure of variance in brightness that an image has – basically the difference between an image’s brightest and darkest points.I’ll be throwing around some fancy words that may mean different things in different contexts, so let me clarify what I mean here first: A list of these articles can be found at the end, though some of the articles will be linked to throughout as well.īefore we begin, let’s make sure we understand each other properly. I’m only going to cover only the basics here, and then follow up with a number of smaller articles for specific situations in order to avoid going on too many tangents. It’s not difficult to make an HDRI that’s good enough for your own use, but if you want to make really good HDRIs that provide accurate and dependable lighting no matter the use case, you need to thoroughly understand every step of the process and how it will affect the outcome. ![]() My goal with this series of articles is to explain everything I’ve learnt about creating HDRIs in order to try and raise the standard of quality of HDRIs shared online.
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