As I began to brush up on my landscape photography skills I came across the polarizing (pun intended) issue of HDR photography. More specifically, I came across a well written blog post titled "Is a Lightroom HDR "Effect", Really HDR?" . To quote the post:
I saw this post the other day on 500px (link: http://500px.com/photo/8023755) and it got me wondering. The photographer, Jose Barbosa (who’s work I think is fabulous by the way), wrote “No HDR” next to his photo. But the photo (to me at least) looks like an HDR photo. (...) I did a little digging in the metadata of his photo and saw lots of adjustment brush work done with Clarity (Basically the HDR effect slider in Lightroom). And in the comments on 500px post, the photographer himself wrote “processing in Lightroom and Viveza 2”. (...)
My point (and question to you) is whether HDR (that’s not really HDR), is still HDR? Hasn’t HDR simply just become and effect? Kinda like Black & White or the cross-processing effect. Do we still need 3 or 5 or 7 bracketed photos that were processed in a program like Photomatix, to classify an image as an official HDR photo? Or is HDR simply the effect of bringing out more detail in the shadows and highlights (and maybe a little gritty/surreal look to it).
It seems I have the same question as the author: What really is the difference between these "fake hdr" effects added through say, lightroom's clarity adjustment, along with a shadow/ highlight recovery as opposed to "real" HDR involving bracketed exposures at +/- n EV ? Is there extra noise in the "fake" method? Is there any (noticeable) difference at all ? On a similar note, is there any reason to take an hdr image if we can just use shadow/highlight recovery to evenly expose the entire scene?
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