Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Digital Photography (Lark Photography) [Paperback]

I am a very experienced photographer (35 years) and have 12 months experience with HDR. Ferrell McCollough's book is an excellent all round view of HDR and related techniques. This book would be an ideal book for an experienced digital photographer just starting in HDR. I found information which confirmed and extended my previous knowledge as well as some new and valuable additional information. I found the book easy to read end to end but it will remain on my shelf as a useful reference book.

The book is almost worth the cost just to see the superb HDR images let alone the wealth of information. This is excellent value.

The "Complete Guide To High Dynamic Range Digital Photography" written by Ferrell McCollough, is an illustrated guide to creating perfectly exposed HDR photographs.

For those that are unfamiliar with the term HDR, the book provides a brief but exacting explanation, it says that "HDR refers to the process of taking several pictures of a scene at various exposure levels, then merging the images into one file to maximize the dynamic range of the captured scene." This would mean you'll end result would be a photograph without shadows, washed out skies, or blown highlights.

HDR photography is becoming increasing popular, and this book is fantastic method for beginners to learn the new technique. Even if your a practiced photographer, but are just unfamiliar with HDR, the book will also be of use.

The book begins with a great overview of HDR photography and covers aspects such as HDR vs RAW, tone mapping, and how HDR helps to reduce noise. A section on equipment, controls and techniques follows. Also included is information on post processing, capturing great image sources, flash merging, architecture, and panoramas. I found the final chapter on "advanced image analysis" the most interesting. It covers something I've never considered before - HDR in black and white. as well as low light photography.

Most chapters end with examples from featured artists. There are some great HDR photographs in the book which show what the technique is really capable of and how it can be used.

The book isn't quite a complete guide. There is little information on the best way to print your HDR images. The absence of such data seems like an unusual thing to miss considering that printing your image is usually the end result. Also missing was some of the more technical (but useful) information such as shutter speed, and aperture priority. Not a great loss, but it would still have been useful for a reference to the photographs.

The book is easy to follow and user friendly, offering in depth and step by step explanations. It's a welcome guide to the world of HDR.

This book gives a good, in depth explanation of the techniques involved in the creation of HDR images.
It's written in easy to follow terms with lots of really clear analogies, making it easier to understand the technical stuff.

However, the author completely misses out the last part of the equation, which is how to prepare your fab new pictures for the web and especially for print. There is no mention of the necessary CMYK conversion process that has to be involved in most printing.

Neither was there any mention of the camera, lense, aperture and shutter speed that most dedicated photographers like to be aware of when examining a photograph technically.

And finally, the author also fails to mention that, using any version of Photoshop with layers, these images can be created in a very simple way. Just layer the various exposures at varying opacities - 100%, 60%, 30%, etc and then apply a contrast curve to the result. So you don't need to rely on the software packages that are covered in the book. Although they're cheap enough, the resulting artifacts and oversaturation can easily overwhelm your image.

Is this book worth the money? You can learn all the ins and outs of HDR online for free, you can look at a zillion HDR images online for free, but if you really want to show people what you're talking about - the printed page does the trick. Which is why it's so annoying that printing is missed out completely.