Is HDR Photography a Cheating?

If you want to take your pictures beyond what your camera sensor is capable of, delving into HDR photography is one way to do that. This allows you to cram much more detail into your images by merging multiple photos of the same thing together. By doing this, you can make sure that your resulting image has much more dynamic range than your camera sensor could achieve with a single photo.

HDR photography is a great way to capture those details in your photos that would otherwise have been lost in dark shadows or blown out highlights. It is an alternative route that you can take to buying a bigger, better, and more expensive camera. But does that make HDR photography a way to cheat?

A Workaround in Tricky Situations

Photographers sometimes find themselves in tricky lighting situations where they know that their cameras will not be able to capture all the detail they want in their photo. In such situations, they typically have two options; use a much more expensive camera with excellent dynamic range, or take multiple photos of the same view with different exposure settings and merge them into one file in post processing.

The latter is what is known as HDR photography. It is not a way to cheat, but a very ingenious way of ensuring that you make the best of your hardware in any given situation. Not everyone has the liberty to spend thousands of dollars on camera gear, so HDR photography provides a very nice workaround to this problem.

The Best Way to Make an HDR

As mentioned before, an HDR image is a combination of multiple photos. This really is the best way to develop an HDR photo as the resulting quality of your image will be very high as compared to resorting to HDR ‘effects’ in an image editor. That said, there are some very good HDR photo editors, like Aurora HDR, that treat your RAW files in a way that they look like HDR images without the loss of quality.

Despite Aurora HDR’s capabilities of creating HDR images from a single photo, it is advisable that you start taking multiple exposure brackets in difficult lighting situations to merge later on. Aurora HDR is also one of the best and simplest HDR processors to use for blending multiple images into one. It gives you granular control over how your final image will look, and produces very natural results as compared to some others on the market.

However, if you want something other than Aurora HDR, then Photomatix Pro is a good choice as well. It has established itself in the HDR processing world and a lot of photographer swear by its capabilities.

HDR feature of Adobe Photoshop is another good alternative to Aurora HDR. It not only merges multiple photos for you but also provides you with its great editing effects so you can go even further with your HDR images right within the same software. HDR photography has been taking off in the world of photography for quite some time now, and a number of photographers around the globe are specializing in this technique. If you also want to experiment with it, or just want to employ it in certain situations, just jump right in and give it a shot.