HDR Image Pool on Flickr

[Frank Petronio]

Thought we could cringe or be inspired. The interiors can be pretty nice, but the skies always look scary, like it is Armageddon or something.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/hdr/pool/

[David Luttmann]

It looks like most of these people are using it to create a different type of "look" rather than to truly utilize increased dynamic range.

Put me down for the "cringe" group.

[Marko]

Like with any other new tool, it's the exaggerations that come first, until the limits are established. Once the novelty wears off, it will either be used as intended or it will be forgotten.

I'm not sure "cringe" is exactly the right word, but yeah, put me down for it too. For me, it's mostly the lack of shadows and/or generally confused sense of the direction of the light that causes the negative feeling...

[Kirk Gittings]

Those images are simply a display of incompetent use of HDR.

[Jack Flesher]

I have to agree Frank -- I have been following threads on other forums on these tools and the skies always seem to go hyper-gray.

[Michael Gordon]

Does HDR also include a "Disneyfy" slider? Some of those look downright cartoonish.

I agree; cringe might not be the right word. Is there a single word to describe rolling my eyes?

[Nitish Kanabar]

Pardon my ignorance - what is HDR?

[Craig Wactor]

I understand the technique being tried in these - exaggerate the atmospheric perspective by adding local contrast to the near areas and lowering it in the distance. That is a trick I've used in printing in the darkroom, as well as in photoshop, but these images look like they are done by someone who has no idea what they are trying to accomplish - like someone with a real understanding of painting or drawing translated it to PS and these guys are imitating an imitator of that. Or maybe someone designed a really horrible PS action?

[Gary Smith]

I have seen a few examples of HDR that look really good. However, most of these simply look like bad posters, or some terrible painting. I go with the cringe crowd.

Gary

[Frank Petronio]

Sorry, HDR stands for "High Dynamic Range" and it is function in Photoshop CS2 that allows you to combine a rich shadow and a rich highlight version of the same image to create a new image with an extended tonal range.

I think the problem stems from people not allowing the shadows or highlights to carry the detail and they tend to shove everything into the middle tones, which are then converted to 8-bit jpgs which only make things worse.

The question is can we ever display (on screen) or print HDR images effectively? I haven't looked into it but my hunch is the file formats and display methods are way behind the "potential" of these images.