Digital Photography Cheats Physics — Pt 2
Part 2
The first digital darkroom tool to be popularized was stitching software that blends together a series of overlapping captures. The most common use of stitching software is in making panoramic images. The image below, the interior trusses of Hayes-Clark Covered Bridge in Chester County Pa., would have been virtually impossible without stitching software.
(Sorry for the small size but with the limited width this is as large as I could make it.)
Stitching software can also be used to create very high resolution images. Instead of capturing a single image with a WA lens a photographer captures the same scene as a series of images in matrix form with a telephoto lens. For example he could capture three rows of four images each, overlapping sides and tops; and stitch them together to form a high resolution image (on the order of 6x larger) in the same format, 3×2, as the single capture. When creating both panos and high resolution images, the stitching software is used pretty much the same way. The difference is the photographer’s intent when the capture was made.
The next tool that photographers starting using in the digital darkroom was focus bracketing and bending two or more images with the focus point in a different locations to extend the area of sharpness. For example, these two images were blended:
to yield this image with extended DOF:
The first image was the basis for the final image then the second image was added as a layer and repositioned so the center of the flower in both images were aligned. Then a mask was use to only reveal the center of the second image creating the blend. This is pretty easy with a simple compositions like this flower; but gets more complicated as the composition complexity increases.
The next tool is High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. A some what oversimplified explanation of this technique is that the software is used to blend together an exposure bracket sequence of the same scene. The software takes the highlights from the dark exposure and the shadows from the bright exposure and blends them with the mid tones of the middle exposure. This style of photography seems to be running rampant in photography circles today.
Both of these image are from Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. And they both are a bit iconic or mature. And to some degree that should be expected at a place like ESP. Visitors are not allowed into the cells so all images of cells are shot from the same place, the doorway.The fist image is of Al Capone’s cell. It is a blend of the exposure fusion result and the Detail Enhancer result.
The second image is of a barber’s chair in a cell. Not sure how it got there. There is no chair in the room identified as the barber shop. This is a blend of all three results, exposure fusion and both tone mapped results.