HDR from RAW question

Instead of taking multiple images, would I get the same effect by taking 1 RAW photo and then adjusting the exposure in DPP, to create new images, and using those for the final HDR image?

No, you would get distinctly inferior results.

So I asked the same question a while ago, when I was just getting interested in HDR. The answer is, it depends. The point of HDR is to obtain details at different exposures that are not available in the 0 exposure - i.e. get details out of the shadows by overexposing and details out of the blown out highlights by underexposing. So if your 0 exposure truly needs details that were not able to be captured, no amount of post is going to recover them. However, many people use 'HDR' software to process over and underexposed images where the dynamic range could be captured by the 0 exposure. Under these circumstances (this is really tone mapping), you might be able to get a decent result from doing what you said. Although even manually doing the over and under exposure is unnecessary, at least with the software I have - Photomatix and SNS-HDR. For both of them, you can import just the 0 exposure and the software will do the tone mapping for you. And as others in this forum will already know, I believe that the new version of Lightroom (v4) gives you a lot of capability to bring out details from the highlights and shadows without going to another software package. Doesnt help if you're going for more extreme processing though. Hope that helps

Colin

michaelnel wrote in post #14112668
No, you would get distinctly inferior results.

Exactly!

augh, this question always ends up in a debate and if you search around you will see it is asked several times with all sorts of opinions.

HDR = multiple exposures of metered shots

Tonemapping = a single file