HDR Photography and Tone Mapping
Wikipedia says:
High dynamic range imaging was originally developed in the 1930s and 1940s by Charles Wyckoff. Wyckoff’s detailed pictures of nuclear explosions appeared on the cover of Life magazine in the mid 1940s.
The process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range, was first reported in 1988 and by 1997 this technique of combining several differently exposed images to produce a single HDR image was presented to the computer graphics community by Paul Debevec. The process has many applications in game design and contributes heavily to the almost unreal look of many games where subtle variations in colour or design are clearly visible even in the stange half light of caverns and tunnels..
This method was developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures. With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy-to-use desktop software, the term HDR is now popularly used to refer to this process.
This composite technique is different from (and may be of lesser or greater quality than) the production of an image from a single exposure of a sensor that has a native high dynamic range. Tone mapping is also used to display HDR images on devices with a low native dynamic range, such as a computer screen.
Below are some of my examples of true HDR images – taken with a Digital SLR at three exposures and then merged into one image with tone mapping as well as artificial HDR images where a single RAW or jpeg image has been taken and has then been tone mapped to bring out detail. On photo sharing websites such as Flickr there are groups dedicated to both HDR and Tone Mapping and they will consider the two systems to be very distinct.
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