GIMP: High Dynamic Range Photo

Just thought I'd demonstrate some of the things we could do with GIMP. I've been studying "High Dynamic Range Photos" for ages, and finally I got the chance to experiment.

It's all thanks to Uncle De really. While we were in Scotland (whoops, I broke my semi-promise not to post on Scotland anymore, sorry readers!) on our last day Uncle De went to the beach during subuh with his camera and took these nice photos of sunrise. The nice thing Uncle De did was take photos with different exposures. If you look at the first picture above the foreground is semi-nicely exposed but the background looks less striking.

In this second photo, Uncle De (probably) did a focus lock on the sky making the sky look very striking. However, the foreground (i.e the street) now looks very dark.

Taking the same scene at multiple exposures like this is a technique called "bracketing". Kudos to Uncle De holding the camera relatively steady as there's not that much difference in positioning of the two photos.

Using GIMP, one is able to combine the striking background, with the well exposed foreground, like so:

In the above picture, I basically took the sky from picture number 2 and pasted it on the better exposed foreground in picture number 1. Thus, the sky looks a nice reddish hue, and the road is nicer exposed too. I also did several other things like level corrections and cropping the image for slightly better presentation.

Well done for the picture Uncle De.

Ps

By no means is a Wacom board necessary for the GIMP project above, a mouse and keyboard would suffice. However, having the board does help make it that much easier:)

Related

1. Flckr pool of high dyanamic range photos >>>>
2. High Dynamic Range article >>>>
3. High Dyanmic Range in Photoshop CS2 >>>>
4. Article in Wikipedia on High Dynamic Range Photography >>>>
5. Another HDR gallery >>>>
6. A brilliant article and gallery featuring HDR photos of Tokyo >>>>
7. HDR Shop a free (I think) software to produre HDR photos >>>>
8. Flickr pool for HDR in GIMP >>>>
9. Tutorial to produce Increased Dynamic Range photos in GIMP >>>>