High Dynamic Range Images

This week I've been learning a bit about HDR images, which are created by taking multiple camera shots with varying exposure settings, then using software to merge them and generate a single image with more balanced exposure (and therefore detail) overall. That's a fairly gross simplification, so maybe start with Wikipedia if you'd like to learn more.

Using Adobe Lightroom CC and their helpful tutorial, I started with this reasonably well exposed shot of a corner of my apartment.

I then took two more photos (a tripod is pretty essential here, but not 100% if you're really good or lucky), one with the shutter speed shifted two full stops' worth slower, and one in the other direction from the base setting.

Then I followed the process described in the aforementioned demo video. The result, below, pretty clearly makes the darker parts of the original image now more discernible in terms of color and detail, while avoiding the brighter parts being washed out or pure white, yet maintaining an overall sense of detail — the word "magic" starts to come to mind. (No post-processing was done to any of these images, other than the process of doing the HDR merge of the 3 shots into one image.)