High-dynamic-range imaging is a set of techniques used in imaging and photography to reproduce
a greater dynamic range of luminosity than possible using standard digital imaging or
photographic techniques. HDR images can represent a greater range of
luminance levels found in real-world scenes, from direct sunlight to faint nebula. It is
often achieved by capturing and then combining different exposures of the same subject matter.
Non-HDR cameras take photographs with a limited exposure range, resulting in the loss of detail
in bright or dark areas. HDR compensates for this loss of detail by capturing multiple
photographs at different exposure levels and combining them to produce a photograph representative
of a broader tonal range. The two primary types of HDR images are computer
renderings and images resulting from merging multiple low-dynamic-range or standard-dynamic-range
photographs. HDR images can also be acquired using special image sensors, like oversampled
binary image sensor. Tone mapping methods, which reduce overall contrast to facilitate
display of HDR images on devices with lower dynamic range, can be applied to produce images
with preserved or exaggerated local contrast for artistic effect.
Photography In photography, dynamic range is measured
in EV differences between the brightest and darkest parts of the image that show detail.
An increase of one EV, or one stop, represents a doubling of the amount of light.
High-dynamic-range photographs are generally achieved by capturing multiple standard photographs,
often using exposure bracketing, and then merging them into an HDR image. Digital photographs
are often encoded in a camera's raw image format, because 8 bit JPEG encoding doesn't
offer enough values to allow fine transitions. The images from any camera that allows manual
exposure control can be used to create HDR images. This includes film cameras, though
the images may need to be digitized so they can be processed with software HDR methods.
Some cameras have an auto exposure bracketing feature with a far greater dynamic range than
others, from the 3 EV of the Canon EOS 40D, to the 18 EV of the Canon EOS-1D Mark II.
As the popularity of this imaging method grows, several camera manufactures are now offering
built-in HDR features. For example, the Pentax K-7 DSLR has an HDR mode that captures an
HDR image and outputs a tone mapped JPEG file. The Canon PowerShot G12, Canon PowerShot S95
and Canon PowerShot S100 offer similar features in a smaller format. Even some smartphones
now include HDR modes, and most platforms have apps that provide HDR picture taking.
Color film negatives and slides consist of multiple film layers that respond to light
differently. As a consequence, transparent originals feature a very high dynamic range.
Camera characteristics Camera characteristics such as gamma curves,
sensor resolution, noise, photometric calibration and spectral calibration affect resulting
high-dynamic-range images. Tone mapping
Tone mapping reduces the dynamic range, or contrast ratio, of an entire image while retaining
localized contrast. Software
Several software applications are available on the PC, Mac and Linux platforms for producing
HDR files and tone mapped images. Notable titles include
Comparison with traditional digital images Information stored in high-dynamic-range images
typically corresponds to the physical values of luminance or radiance that can be observed
in the real world. This is different from traditional digital images, which represent
colors that should appear on a monitor or a paper print. Therefore, HDR image formats
are often called scene-referred, in contrast to traditional digital images, which are device-referred
or output-referred. Furthermore, traditional images are usually encoded for the human visual
system, which is usually called gamma encoding or gamma correction. The values stored for
HDR images are often gamma compressed or logarithmically encoded, or floating-point linear values,
since fixed-point linear encodings are increasingly inefficient over higher dynamic ranges.
HDR images often don't use fixed ranges per color channel—other than for traditional
images—to represent many more colors over a much wider dynamic range. For that purpose,
they don't use integer values to represent the single color channels but instead use
a floating point representation. Common are 16-bit or 32-bit floating point numbers to
represent HDR pixels. However, when the appropriate transfer function is used, HDR pixels for
some applications can be represented with as few as 10–12 bits for luminance and
8 bits for chrominance without introducing any visible quantization artifacts.
History of HDR photography Mid-nineteenth century
The idea of using several exposures to fix a too-extreme range of luminance was pioneered
as early as the 1850s by Gustave Le Gray to render seascapes showing both the sky and
the sea. Such rendering was impossible at the time using standard methods, the luminosity
range being too extreme. Le Gray used one negative for the sky, and another one with
a longer exposure for the sea, and combined the two into one picture in positive.
Mid-twentieth century Manual tone mapping was accomplished by dodging
and burning – selectively increasing or decreasing the exposure of regions of the
photograph to yield better tonality reproduction. This is effective because the dynamic range
of the negative is significantly higher than would be available on the finished positive
paper print when that is exposed via the negative in a uniform manner. An excellent example
is the photograph Schweitzer at the Lamp by W. Eugene Smith, from his 1954 photo essay
A Man of Mercy on Dr. Albert Schweitzer and his humanitarian work in French Equatorial
Africa. The image took 5 days to reproduce the tonal range of the scene, which ranges
from a bright lamp to a dark shadow. Ansel Adams elevated dodging and burning to
an art form. Many of his famous prints were manipulated in the darkroom with these two
methods. Adams wrote a comprehensive book on producing prints called The Print, which
features dodging and burning prominently, in the context of his Zone System.
With the advent of color photography, tone mapping in the darkroom was no longer possible,
due to the specific timing needed during the developing process of color film. Photographers
looked to film manufacturers to design new film stocks with improved response over the
years, or shot in black and white to use tone mapping methods.
Film capable of directly recording high-dynamic-range images was developed by Charles Wyckoff and
EG&G "in the course of a contract with the Department of the Air Force". This XR film
had three emulsion layers, an upper layer having an ASA speed rating of 400, a middle
layer with an intermediate rating, and a lower layer with an ASA rating of 0.004. The film
was processed in a manner similar to color films, and each layer produced a different
color. The dynamic range of this extended range film has been estimated as 1:108. It
has been used to photograph nuclear explosions, for astronomical photography, for spectrographic
research, and for medical imaging. Wyckoff's detailed pictures of nuclear explosions appeared
on the cover of Life magazine in the mid-1950s. Late-twentieth century
The concept of neighborhood tone mapping was applied to video cameras by a group from the
Technion in Israel led by Prof. Y.Y.Zeevi who filed for a patent on this concept in
1988. In 1993 the first commercial medical camera was introduced that performed real
time capturing of multiple images with different exposures, and producing an HDR video image,
by the same group. Modern HDR imaging uses a completely different
approach, based on making a high-dynamic-range luminance or light map using only global image
operations, and then tone mapping this result. Global HDR was first introduced in 1993 resulting
in a mathematical theory of differently exposed pictures of the same subject matter that was
published in 1995 by Steve Mann and Rosalind Picard.
The advent of consumer digital cameras produced a new demand for HDR imaging to improve the
light response of digital camera sensors, which had a much smaller dynamic range than
film. Steve Mann developed and patented the global-HDR method for producing digital images
having extended dynamic range at the MIT Media Laboratory. Mann's method involved a two-step
procedure: generate one floating point image array by global-only image operations; and
then convert this image array, using local neighborhood processing, into an HDR image.
The image array generated by the first step of Mann's process is called a lightspace image,
lightspace picture, or radiance map. Another benefit of global-HDR imaging is that it provides
access to the intermediate light or radiance map, which has been used for computer vision,
and other image processing operations. In 2005, Adobe Systems introduced several
new features in Photoshop CS2 including Merge to HDR, 32 bit floating point image support,
and HDR tone mapping. Video
While custom high-dynamic-range digital video solutions had been developed for industrial
manufacturing during the 1980s, it was not until the early 2000s that several scholarly
research efforts used consumer-grade sensors and cameras. A few companies such as RED and
Arri have been developing digital sensors capable of a higher dynamic range. RED EPIC-X
can capture HDRx images with a user selectable 1-3 stops of additional highlight latitude
in the 'x' channel. The 'x' channel can be merged with the normal channel in post production
software. With the advent of low-cost consumer digital cameras, many amateurs began posting
tone mapped HDR time-lapse videos on the Internet, essentially a sequence of still photographs
in quick succession. In 2010 the independent studio Soviet Montage produced an example
of HDR video from disparately exposed video streams using a beam splitter and consumer
grade HD video cameras. Similar methods have been described in the academic literature
in 2001 and 2007. Modern movies have often been filmed with
cameras featuring a higher dynamic range, and legacy movies can be upgraded even if
manual intervention would be needed for some frames. Also, special effects, especially
those in which real and synthetic footage are seamlessly mixed, require both HDR shooting
and rendering. HDR video is also needed in all applications in which capturing temporal
aspects of changes in the scene demands high accuracy. This is especially important in
monitoring of some industrial processes such as welding, predictive driver assistance systems
in automotive industry, surveillance systems, to name just a few possible applications.
HDR video can be also considered to speed up the image acquisition in all applications,
in which a large number of static HDR images are needed, as for example in image-based
methods in computer graphics. Finally, with the spread of TV sets with enhanced dynamic
range, broadcasting HDR video may become important, but may take a long time to occur due to standardization
issues. For this particular application, enhancing current Low-dynamic-range rendering video
signal to HDR by intelligent TV sets seems to be a more viable near-term solution.
Example This is an example of four standard dynamic
range images that are combined to produce two resulting tone mapped images.
Original images
HDR sensors More and more CMOS image sensors now have
high dynamic range capability within the pixels themselves. Such pixels are intrinsically
non-linear so that the wide dynamic range of the scene is non-linearly compressed into
a smaller dynamic range electronic representation inside the pixel. Such sensors are used in
extreme dynamic range applications like welding or automotive.
Some other sensors designed for use in security applications can automatically provide two
or more images for each frame, with changing exposure. For example a sensor for 30fps video
will give out 60fps with the odd frames at a short exposure time and the even frames
at a longer exposure time. Some of the sensor may even combine the two images on-chip so
that a wider dynamic range without in-pixel compression is directly available to the user
for display or processing. See also
References