[HDR-photo] Professional printing of HDR images

[Geraldine Joffre]

On Thu, 3 Jul 2008 23:12:09 -0400, Dave Feltenberger wrote
> At a certain level, albeit not nearly as clearcut, I equate the insistence
> on pointing out HDR's technically correct usage to the above 
> examples. Sure, people constantly misuse it, but 90% of the time (or 
> more) people don't care what bit depth images are, nor would they 
> understand if they were told - they just see an intensely colorful 
> photo that looks semi-unreal and immediately associate the term 
> "HDR" with it.  I'm pretty confident that this won't change no 
> matter how much our small percentage of knowledgeable folk fight 
> against it.  
I would not be so defeatist.  While I agree with you that knowledgeable people
should not require everyone use terms correctly, I believe that such type of
confusion with HDR terminology is mainly because HDR techniques are relatively
new in digital photography, and thus not yet well understood.  

You are right that most people don't care what bit depth images are, nor would
they understand if they were told.  However, most photographers do understand
what an exposure is, what lack of captured dynamic range means for their
photos, why it may make sense to take multiple exposures, and that color
saturation is not the same as dynamic range.  Reminding them the correct
meaning of HDR is not an impossible task, in my opinion.

Also, I would say that associating HDR with over-saturated, overdone images is
just because it has become a fad to abuse tone mapping techniques with the aim
of creating an unrealistic look from a single LDR image.  But, as any fad, it
will fade away once people jump on to the next hot thing in post-processing
techniques.  HDR -the way we understand it- is too essential to photography to
be a fad.

Geraldine Joffre