The HDRI Handbook

Hi All - I should like to draw the attention of HDR fans to the following book:

"The HDRI Handbook", Christian Bloch, rockynook, Santa Barbara, 2007, ISBN978-1-933952-05-5.

It is available from on-line stores. This book is a must for serious HDR photographers. It is not for those who dabble, but if you wish to pursue the concepts, techniques, applications, history, software, hardware, future developments, it is excellent.

Two quick points that I had not appreciated before (perhaps I should have but there it is). First, Photoshop CS3 has a number of editing tools available to treat HDR images (i.e. the 32-bit floating point maps). These include sharpening filters, cloning, exposure control, and so on. (I note McQ's tutorial says the editing possibilities in Photoshop are limited, but perhaps he's referring to earlier versions.) There are similar, but not as extensive, capabilities in Artizen, which I have now obtained. The point is, however, that editing the HDR images is now for real, before any tone-mapping.

Second, for archival purposes, the two formats ".hdr" and ".exr" are to be preferred over any others for storing HDR files. Of the two, the .exr (from Openexr) is probably the safer for the long-term. I had not realised that there are about half-a-dozen different formats for storing HDR files.

Finally, I know this is a third point, if you ever wondered about shiny balls and HDR, this is the book for you!

Cheers

David