It’s quite pretty London during the night time. I took some photos recently testing out the HDR possibilities of Photoshop and my camera.
For those not in the know Photoshop allows you to take several bracketed photos and merge them into one high dynamic range image. The advantages of this are you can cheat the normal dynamic range of the cameras sensor – when you “bracket” a photo you take one correctly exposed image and then another two (or more) under and over exposed by a given amount – usually 1 stop. Once you’ve merged these together you get a single floating point 32 bit image with a huge amount of latitude – you can drag the levels about all over the place without any of the usual degradation associated with manipulating a single 8 bit exposure. It’s idea for any situation where the camera cannot cope with the contrast range within a single image.
The only issue I’ve noticed so far is an increase in noise and some banding – I suspect I can get better results by shooting RAW, more experiments soon.
{gallery}london-by-night{/gallery}