SnapperTalk

Veteran Photoshop plug-in creator Fred Miranda has a very clever plug-in called DRI Pro. The idea behind bears its origins in the old split-grade black & white printing where you would expose an image on multi-grade paper partially at high contrast and partially at low-contrast, thus increasing the dynamic range of the resulting image. This plug-in claims to bring that functionality to digital images and will appeal to imaging perfectionists and those needing to handle high-contrast and/or badly exposed scenes.

To start you would need two identical images – one exposed for shadow detail and another for highlight detail. If the camera was on a tripod one could theoretically shoot two separate frames and start from there. Or you could take an original jpeg and save it as two TIFFs each with different tonal adjustments made to capture the shadow and highlight detail. But where this plug-in would really find its raison d’être is with RAW images. RAW images capture a much higher dynamic range than a jpeg and so you would process the same RAW file twice – firstly adjusted to capture the upper levels/highlights, and another time to capture the lower levels/shadows. Once you save these two resulting images and feed them through the plug-in, it would blend the two to create a single image that captures both the shadow and highlight details.

I haven’t actually tried the plug-in, which can be ordered from the site for $19.90, so if anyone has please let me know how well it works. There are manual ways to achieve similar blending results described in this tutorial at Luminous Landscape and this one at Samy’s Camera.