UKC

Looking to buy a new compact camera for climbing/hill days (Sony rx100 seems to be everyone's favorite).

A friend of mine has an HDR function on his samsung phone which has a fantastic effect, particularly on the kinds of photos climbers and hillgoers often take in the UK- moody skies and dark foregrounds. It essentially takes the same photo at multiple exposures and then merges them together, correcting for over & under exposed areas.

Is there any way to achieve this with a compact- is it not part of standard programming by now? The 'functionality' lists in online adverts/ reviews don't seem to feature it.

Not going to carry a tripod and then merge the photos manually now that I've seen how quick it can be done on a smartphone!


Malcolm

In reply to malcolm.harris:

Well, to make a true HDR you need a number of shots to be taken. In some cases, shooting to RAW and adjusting a single file seems to be enough if you don't want that over-saturated HDR effect. Whether the camera itself or you during post-process merge the files, it is up to you. I don't want the camera to merge them as I might use different software to get HDRs the way I want them to look like.

It looks like that RX100 has HDR feature which allows to merge the files in the camera: youtube.com/watch?v=YuvVZQbvy0g& (see the comments below, too).

In reply to PPP:

The problem I have with in camera HDR is that all the ones I have seen merge and tonemap in one go, throwing away the hdr information.

If they saved something like an openEXR then I would find them a lot more interesting.

In reply to malcolm.harris:

The rx100 has an hdr type function. I never use it and regard it as pretty poor.

Far more annoyingly, it doesn't allow you to produce a decent set of bracketed images (it allows bracketing but not with enough range). So is not very good for hdr.

On the positive side, it does have a great sensor with good dynamic range, so hdr is needed less often.

In reply to Dan Arkle:


I've played around with the RX100 HDR type function and quite liked some of the results.

In reply to malcolm.harris:

My Canon Powershot S95 has an HDR function, but it only works with a tripod. It will also bracket by a stop either side, in RAW, which I can merge in Photoshop without having used a tripod. The results aren't as freaky as the HDR I've seen on Flickr, probably needs a larger bracketing range.