How to increase dynamic range
How to increase dynamic range
6 Simple Ways To Achieve The Extended Dynamic Range In Your Photos
It’s a phrase we hear over and over in photography – high dynamic range, the sensor’s dynamic range – but what exactly is dynamic range and why is it important to understand how it affects your photography?
What Is Dynamic Range?
Well, let’s start with the fact that all audio and visual sensing devices have a dynamic range. That includes our very own eyes and ears. In visual terms, dynamic range is the ratio between the minimum and maximum light levels that a particular sensor can measure. In the case of our eyes, that range is immense – we can determine a vast amount of tones but not the full range. Imagine sitting in a dark room with one large window and a very bright sunny view outside.
If you look at the view, your eyes will not see anything in the room, it will be too dark. Conversely, if you look inside the room, the view outside will be too bright to decipher anything. This is demonstrating the dynamic range of your eyes. Your camera sensor, unfortunately, has significantly less dynamic range than your eyes, but by understanding it we can deal with lighting that exceeds the dynamic range of our camera sensors.
Photo by Christopher Zarriello
The Limitations Of Your Camera Sensor
We have all come across the limitations of our camera sensors, many times. It manifests itself, in particular, with blown highlights – those areas of intense brightness within an image that were too bright for the camera’s sensor to deal with. They appear in the final shot as pure white and no matter how you try to process the image, nothing will ever pull the detail back, all that will happen is that you make that pure white grey.
This happens because your camera’s exposure meter is tuned to work out an average for the scene and if there is too much contrast it cannot expose the entire dynamic range. This is quite a common scenario in photography, direct light casting dark shadows, reflections on dark surfaces, a dark dog on white snow, all of these and many more can exceed the sensor’s capabilities. So how can we control this issue and extend the dynamic range of our photos?
Photo by Alexander Andrews
How To Extend The Dynamic Range
1. Shoot Raw
Because Raw files give us only the pure data from the sensor, we are getting the full dynamic range capabilities from that sensor. Jpg files go through internal processing before being saved and this invariably clips off some of the dynamic range at one end of the scale or the other. By using a Raw file we can carefully manipulate the image in post production, attempting to get the maximum range that the shot offers.
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon
2. Shoot Low ISO
As you increase your ISO, not only does the noise level increase but also the dynamic range decreases. For each step up in ISO, there will be a small but discernible drop in the dynamic range of your image. If the light is low, it is better to use a tripod and low shutter speed than hand holding at higher ISO.
Photo by Brandon Morrison
3. Shoot HDR
HDR some times gets a bad press due to some of the overly garish images it produces. However, it is in fact a tool for increasing the dynamic range of your images but keeping them natural looking. By shooting a range of exposures and carefully combining them in Photoshop or an HDR program, you can dramatically increase your dynamic range without making the image look unnatural.
Photo by Andreas M
4. Learn Your Histogram
The key to getting the optimum exposure from your sensor is to understand your histogram. Put simply, that little graph on your screen can show you if you are exceeding dynamic range. If the graph falls off to the left, then you are losing dynamic range in the shadows, if it falls to the right your loss is in the highlights. Bear in mind, most histograms are based on a jpg version of the shot, a RAW file might be able to recover some of the detail at either end.
Photo by Maxim Medvedev
5. Shoot To The Right
This is complicated subject but in it’s simplest terms, camera sensors are more efficient at the brighter end of a dynamic range. By shifting our histogram to the right end of the graph, by increasing our exposure we can make sure we are getting the best dynamic range from the sensor. The key is not to allow any of the histogram to fall off the right side of the graph as these will become the “unrecoverable” highlights.
Photo by Ferdinand Studio
6. Use A Graduated Filter
One of the key problems with dynamic range is found in landscape photography, where the sky is often too bright to maintain detail if the landscape is exposed correctly. To counter this we can use a graduated filter, which effectively reduces that dynamic range to something that the sensor can deal with.
Photo by Arvin Wiyono
Dynamic range is an important subject in photography. By understanding the limitations of our sensors and how to counter an excessive dynamic range, we can create quality shots with a full range of tones and colors.
Audacity Forum
For questions, answers and opinions
How to Increase Dynamic Range
How to Increase Dynamic Range
Post by rafscbb » Wed Mar 26, 2008 1:29 am
Re: How to Increase Dynamic Range
Post by alatham » Wed Mar 26, 2008 2:14 am
All of the plugins I’ve used by Steve have been of high quality, so I’d expect nothing less from this particular one.
If you don’t already have this effect, it’s a part of the LADSPA plugins pack available here, the installation is Operating System specific, so pay attention to that:
http://audacityteam.org/download/plugins
Re: How to Increase Dynamic Range
Post by kozikowski » Fri Mar 28, 2008 4:37 pm
You may find that increasing the dynamic range of a show to be a mixed blessing. There are actual complaints on the video forums about having the sound track too good. If you listen to dialog at a comfortable level and somebody fires a gun—or in the case of CSI-Miami, blows up a boat in Biscayne Harbor, my sound system will punch over the oatmeal bowl and scare cats across the street. Now let’s say I lived in an apartment. That’s less good. Now let’s say my SO is trying to sleep in the next room.
Yes, I understand that playing the 1812 that was recorded on Washington Mall with the canons across the river in Fort Meyer may be a problem on a conventional recording, but don’t fall in love with the effect. If for no other reason, these tools tend to have exactly the same problems as compressors—at least four different adjustments, sometimes more—and can create much more damage than is worth the effort.
Re: How to Increase Dynamic Range
Post by steve » Fri Mar 28, 2008 8:04 pm
You are best to seek out «good» recordings. For Classical music, there are magazines such as «Gramophone» that will review the virtues of particular recordings compared to others. The «budget» line of CD’s are rarely top quality.
When a CD is «mastered», the sound engineer will often use a multi-band compressor to try and create a recording that offers the best listening pleasure for the target audience. With dance music, this is typically to compress it severely to make it as loud as possible. A good orchestral / classic rock / folk / jazz recording will typically offer a greater dynamic range, but they still have to fit the full range of dynamics into less than 16 bit.
The problem with trying to «uncompress» the sound, is that not only do you have to guess how much compression they have used, and at what threshold it was applied, and how hard or soft the «knee» they used, but multi-band compressors apply different compressions to different frequency bands and you don’t know what bands were used. Finally, even if you do know (or guess correctly) these settings, compressors have «attack» and «decay» settings that govern the speed at which the compression is applied. If for example the compressor uses a 10 ms attack and a 200 ms release, then it will take 10 ms of a loud signal before the compressor «kicks in», and when the sound drops below the threshold, it will take 200 ms before the compressor allows the sound to return to its correct (uncompressed) level. To uncompress this correctly, the expander would need to know if a particular series of samples were compressed because the original level was above the threshold, or because it was within the release phase of the compressor, and there is no way of knowing this.
There are «noise reduction» systems such as «Dolby C», «Dolby S» and «DBX» that use compression/decompression to increase the dynamic range of audio tape, but even though these use «standard» settings that aim to be reversible, there is still noticeable «mis-tracking» between the compression and expansion.
Excel Dynamic Range Formulas to Automatically Increase or Decrease Your Range
Microsoft Office offers far more than just what it says on the box. Programs like Word and Excel are far more powerful than just an average word processor and spreadsheet. Part of the power behind these applications can be found in the built-in functions that they offer. Excel for example offers over 400 built-in functions that use the power of VBA for applications to accomplish difficult tasks simply and efficiently. And when these functions are used in combination, the sky really becomes the limit to the functionality offered by Excel.
For a fantastic course on Excel, aimed at the beginner and more advanced user, sign up for the Microsoft Excel 2010 Course Beginners/ Intermediate Training course now from Udemy and take advantage of the power of tutorials to learn to harness the power of Excel.
This tutorial will show you how to create dynamic ranges for your worksheet. A dynamic range is a named range that atomically adjusts the size of the range when values are added to the range or when values are removed from the range.
The tutorial assumes you know how to create and name a range. For an article on how to work with cell references and create named ranges, you can read Excel Cell References and How to Use Them in Your Worksheets and Formulas, available from the Udemy blog. The tutorial also makes use of the OFFSET and COUNTA functions. For an explanation of how the COUNTA function works, you can read Excel COUNTA: A Step-by-Step Tutorial to Show You How to Use COUNTA.
This tutorial will use the following simple spreadsheet to show you how to create your own dynamic range:
The worksheet contains fictitious sales data. The total sales value is calculated using the following formula:
The average sale per day value is calculated using the following formula:
The reason we are using COUNTA to calculate the total number of sales for the formula, is because once we create the dynamic range, then we will need a way to calculate the number of sales dynamically as well. COUNTA allows you to dynamically calculate the number of sales by counting the number of cells in the column that contains values. The count would include the title cell so the formula takes off one for the title cell.
For a great course on Excel, sign up for the Microsoft Excel 2013 Training Tutorial now and learn to harness the power of formulas in your worksheet.
Now let’s add a sale to our worksheet:
You will notice that the total sales value has not increased. The average sales per day is also incorrect because the sale was not calculated as part of the total sales made.
To add a row automatically when we add further sales to our worksheets, we need to create dynamic ranges that increase or decrease as we add records to the worksheet.
To create a dynamic range we first need to create named ranges for the columns in our worksheet.
How to Create Dynamic Named Ranges
For the purposes of this tutorial we have named the three columns in the example worksheet as “SalesDate”, “Salesman” and “SalesTotal”.
To name the ranges, select the range you want to name and select the formulas tab, and then select the Define Name option from the Defined Names section of the menu.
The following window will appear:
To create the named range you need to enter the name of the range under name. We are going to call the dates range we have selected “SalesDate”.
Next we need to enter the formula under the “refers to” section. This formula will create a range that grows or shrinks as we add or remove a new sales date to our worksheet.
The formula you will enter will be:
You also need to create a dynamic range for the “Salesman” and “SalesTotal” ranges in the same way, using the necessary columns in each named range.
This is what the named range for the “Salesman” will look like:
And this is what the formula for the “SalesTotal” range will look like:
The OFFSET function is used to create the dynamic range. The OFFSET function uses 5 parameters to return a reference to a range that is offset from the original range. In this case we are not using the offset to offset the range as such but to create a new range based on whether the range has increased or decreased.
By using the COUNTA function within the OFFSET function, we are effectively creating a range based on the value returned by the COUNTA function that reflects the size of the range based on the number of cells that contain values included within the range. So for example if there are 8 cells that contain values within the SalesTotal range, the OFFSET function will create a range of 8 cells. Similarly if you remove a value from the cell, the COUNTA function will count that there are now 7 cells that contain values and the OFFSET function will then create a range of 7 rows for that range.
For an advanced tutorial on Excel, sign up for the Microsoft Excel – Advanced Excel 2010 Training course from Udemy today.
Now we need to adjust our Sum functions in the Total sales per day and Average sales per day formulas to calculate the SUM of the named ranges rather than the column references.
The new formula for the total sales calculation will be:
And the formula for the average sales will be:
If you take a look at the answers to the Sales total and average sales now, you will notice that the Total sales and average sales now correctly reflect the new sale we added.
The worksheet with dynamic ranges looks like this:
If we add further sales to our worksheet now, the figures and ranges automatically increase to include those new sales.
The advantages of Excel Dynamic Ranges
Excel worksheets are most often works in progress. Most of the worksheets we work on are constantly being updated in terms of the data we need to store and manipulate. When you add rows or columns to a worksheet, formulas need to be changed or adapted to include the new information.
Knowing how to create dynamic ranges means that you no longer have to spend valuable time adjusting your formulas and functions. The dynamic range automatically adjusts all of these formulas for you so that you can concentrate on the data itself.
For a comprehensive course on how to harness the power of Excel for you, sign up for the Excel for Business – Learn Excel Online course from Udemy today.
Dynamic Range Increase – Part 1
Hello again, as I’ve said in my last post I will now do a little tutorial on how to increase the dynamic range in photos while still keeping a natural look. This tutorial will be spread about 4 different posts. We will start here in Part 1 by defining what we want to achieve with the DRI technique and what not! We’ll also do a short outline of the following tutorial parts.
But first of all I’ll show you the image I use as showcase in this tutorial.
I shot this last Summer on the island Hönö in Sweden. It’s a beautiful place to watch the sunset. As you can see I shot nearly directly into the sun. By waiting till the sun was behind the clouds I managed to decrease the dynamic range a bit and also create a nice mood. Another advantage of using the clouds to shade out the sun is you don’t get lense blurs! But still the dynamic range in this shot is beyond what my Canon EOS40d and other digital cameras can capture. So what I did, I shot three exposures. I’ll show those together with some details in Part 2.
Ok now let’s discuss what’s the goal of the DRI technique I’ll show here. We don’t want to achieve the typical HDR look you see so often these days. I don’t think this look suites for example landscape images but that’s my subjective opinion 😉 We’re looking at something in between here. The aim is to use the DRI techniques to do exactly what the name DRI means, increasing the dynamic range. So no effects, no increased saturation or enhanced structures. We just want to get an image without blown out highlights and detail in the shadows as a good starting point for postprocessing. We will do this in Part 2 and 3. The postprocessing then closes the tutorial in Part 4. Here we will use Adobe Lightroom 2 to make the final adjustments on the image.
One additional note. Besides using the DRI techniques for postprocessing you can use graduated neutral density filters during capture to work against blown out skies. The image I showed above would have been an ideal candidate but even without those filters I think I got a good result although more work on the PC was needed afterwards. What you should keep in mind is the less work is needed on the PC the better the quality of your image, so such filters would be a good buy if you are often shooting sunset or sunrise scenes.
How to increase the dynamic range for a landscape photo without post-processing?
I like to take landscape photographs, during the golden hour. I always try to get high dynamic range so as to get the foreground and background proportionally highlighted, but I fail miserably (I use the Nikon D3300 with 18-55mm basic lens).
I tried stacking a few images with different exposures, but didn’t quite get what I wanted (also I had to convert the images first to JPEG to input them to the stacking software). I then read about the neutral density and polarizing filter. I want to know how can these filters help me increase the dynamic range? Also I generally don’t have a water stream in the composition for which the ND filter is mostly used.
Also I would like to know any other techniques to increase the dynamic range of a photo except post processing.
7 Answers 7
As written your question restricts the answer to «in camera» as you say «except post processing». The graduated ND filters as mentioned in the comments can help with specific circumstances (when there’s a linear demarcation between bright and dim). The other in-camera option is to shoot the lowest ISO you can, as you get more dynamic range at low ISO (but to be fair this is usable mostly only in post processing). You can also work with your in-camera JPG processing to increase shadows and kill highlights.
If you expand the answer to include post processing:
There are several ways you can improve the amount of dynamic-range captured. You do not have to use all these at once but consider each one a tool: