Review: The HDRI Handbook by Christian Bloch

Per­haps one of my biggest weak­nesses is my ten­dency to be stub­born. I like to some­times think that I “know-it-all”, although the obvi­ous real­ity is that I don’t. The topic of HDR or High Dynamic Range imag­ing has been in the fore­front of my mind since I first started play­ing around with 3D appli­ca­tions many years ago. In fact, I was one of the first self-taught peo­ple that I knew who started play­ing cap­tur­ing HDR images using the old reflec­tive chrome ball method. This was “back in the day” when dSLRs first hit the mar­ket, and HDR was a com­pletely for­eign term to Adobe.

But I wasn’t sat­is­fied with my HDRs qual­ity and lim­i­ta­tions. I real­ized quickly that I needed bet­ter pho­tog­ra­phy equip­ment if I wanted sharper and larger images for 3d pur­poses. I almost stopped as soon as I started because I couldn’t over­come the costs involved in pur­chas­ing “bet­ter” equip­ment. Being an early adopter is not nec­es­sar­ily a badge of honor — espe­cially when con­sid­er­ing that there are always peo­ple that often come before you and even those that sur­pass your level of knowl­edge regard­less of time. This is one of those sit­u­a­tions which I found myself unex­pect­edly being the stu­dent again.

As of the last few months, I decided to pick back up the hobby — this time with the proper cam­era equip­ment. And since I invested a sig­nif­i­cant amount of money in the new cam­era equip­ment, I wanted to make cer­tain that I had most of my facts cor­rect. I surfed the web once again for updated mate­ri­als on HDR and panoramic stitch­ing appli­ca­tions and tuto­ri­als. Per­haps the most use­ful site that I came across was HDR­Labs by Chris­t­ian Bloch. I joined his forum there and started ask­ing a lot of ques­tions, all of which went answered by its gen­er­ous com­mu­nity. I also found other people’s posts which turned out to be equally use­ful in my method­ol­ogy detec­tive work.

Over time, Chris­t­ian and I started email­ing each other — most of the time it involved me pick­ing his brain for knowl­edge. It turns out that he is a very kind, intel­li­gent, and patient indi­vid­ual. He could have com­pletely ignored my ques­tions and sim­ply told me to “buy my book,” but he didn’t for which I have to give him a lot of credit. Instead, he took the gen­er­ous time to answer all of my emailed ques­tions on a per­sonal basis. He ended up help­ing me out a lot more than I could have ever imag­ined — and because of this, I fig­ured the least I could do is pur­chase his book, The HDRI Hand­book. While I real­ize pur­chas­ing this book isn’t going to make him rich, it would be more of a sign of my sup­port for all the help he has given me as well as the com­mu­nity at large. I also fig­ured, ‘maybe just maybe’ I’ll gain some­thing out of it.

So a few weeks back, I receive The HDRI Hand­book at my doorstep. I pro­ceeded to drop what I was work­ing on and started to read it from cover to cover. My thought was that as much as I knew, there were going to be a lot of smaller details that I have missed. It was those smaller details and miss­ing gaps of infor­ma­tion that I wanted to make sure were cov­ered. I also felt that giv­ing him a fair and objec­tive review would also be in order. Let me start off by say­ing that if I found the book to be a dis­ap­point­ment, I would not be writ­ing this arti­cle right now. I couldn’t have been more wrong in my skepticism.

It turns out that it is a fan­tas­tic pur­chase. Any­one from the begin­ner level to advanced that is inter­ested in cap­tur­ing their own HDRs should own a copy of this book. Although it does con­tain infor­ma­tion for 3d artists, it con­tains plenty of use­ful infor­ma­tion for pho­tog­ra­phers as well — after all, High Dynamic Range images have their basis in the 3d world. It really cov­ers the whole spec­trum of the topic. It is writ­ten in a style that is very thor­ough and should be easy to under­stand for peo­ple at all lev­els of knowl­edge. It even goes into unbi­ased detail and objec­tive opin­ion as to the var­i­ous HDR pro­grams which are avail­able to pho­tog­ra­phers and artists.

The book sur­prised me by show­ing me a bunch of tonemap­ping tech­niques and exam­ples from some very skilled artists and pho­tog­ra­phers. His exam­ples are actu­ally quite infor­ma­tive — he did not skip out on pro­vid­ing use­ful images, tech­niques, and tuto­ri­als through­out the book. And per­haps what I found most impor­tant was that it reaf­firmed a lot of my own self-taught thoughts and con­cepts for which I had noth­ing else to refer back to.

Hav­ing spent many years in the pub­lish­ing indus­try, I can say that a lot of time and effort was put into the writ­ing and pro­duc­tion of this book. If you’re at all seri­ous about HDR pho­tog­ra­phy, you would really be doing your­self, him, and the com­mu­nity a huge favor by mak­ing this pur­chase. It is money that was very wisely spent. I look for­ward to future mate­ri­als writ­ten by Chris­t­ian Bloch.