This is my second HDR picture, also of Niagara Falls. Hope you like it! I spent an hour tweaking and pushing sliders around in PhotoMatix, a programme that makes HDR pictures, to optimise the result, and then some more time doing post-processing in Lightroom. This one was composed of three different pictures, but unfortunately, they too were JPEGs.

I wanted to try out making High Dynamic Range (HDR) images, which seems to be all the range these days. HDR imaging is characterised by capturing a wider rage of colours. In other words, the HDR picture I have made here is able to show details in both the highlights and the shadows. Normally, of course, there would far more clipping in both the highlight and shadow areas – they would be either completely white or completely black. If you are interested, you can read more about what HDR is here; you can see examples of HDR pictures here; and you can find a lot of HDR resources here.

This HDR is my first try, so it is far from perfect. It was made of only two pictures that I had lying around from my last visit to Niagara Falls – JPEGs at that, which contain less colour information than camera raw. For optimal results, I gather you should use at least three raw files with three different exposures to capture both the highlights, midtones and shadows. More HDR pictures will follow.