HDR (High Dynamic Range).

Guided tours with lectures by photographer Nicholas Hellmuth on HDR software

How to do high dynamic range? When you have gorgeous tropical flowers or photogenic 16th century Spanish colonial architecture, it’s a lot easier to produce photographs that will impress your family, friends, and business associates.

At the end of the trip we can suggest how to get your new-found professional-quality digital photographs printed, so you can exhibit them for your friends.

We can also explain how you can have a short-run digital book printed with your photographs, as presents for your friends or family.

Or you can display your new photographs from a learning experience with FLAAR on your web site, or on Flickr.

The trip can be for a long-weekend, or a week, or two weeks. Cost for instruction by the FLAAR photography team is $1200 for a long weekend, $2300 for a week, $4100 for two weeks (plus airfare, hotel and meals). The fee covers the experience and local transportation once the trip itself starts. Please note: this is not a tour; this is not for tourists. This is a digital photography field trip. Destinations vary between 16th century architecture in colonial Antigua Guatemala and flowers in remote areas of the country. Although we provide instruction, this is not really a school or a formal course; this is a working photography expedition.

The team is equipped with Canon, Nikon, and medium format digital cameras. We assume that you will bring your own digital camera, but yes, you will have opportunities to experiment with the FLAAR equipment. If you will need an assistant to carry your own equipment, in some cases this can be arranged for modest cost.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) with Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Lectures, courses, tips, help on HDR software

If you don’t have time to get to Guatemala to join Nicholas on a field trip, then you can bring Dr Hellmuth to your home town (anywhere in the world) to lecture.

He can present the step-by-step information on HDR in any local school, college, university or museum. Or the lecture can be at your alumni association, club, or at your company.  You can invite family and friends.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is great; what will Adobe Photoshop CS4 offer!

All versions of Photoshop since version 7 are sophisticated. Version 5 and one of the version 6’s was a dog. But CS3 (roughly version 10 or perhaps 11) is definitely better, especially for high dynamic range.

After-market software for HDR is also available

The benefit of doing HDR in Adobe Photoshop is that you can interact with any and all other photographers because they are all using Adobe Photoshop. The benefit of using an after-market HDR software for high dynamic range is that if a small company depends on survival by making an HDR software then it’s software will probably be better than that of Adobe Photoshop.

The reason is because Photoshop has to do 101 things acceptably. A dedicated after-market HDR software has to do only one thing, but it must be better than this feature in Photoshop (or else why bother with a separate software).

Before HDR.

End Result HDR with Adobe Photoshop CS3.

First posted February 2008.

You can order these reports from FLAAR