High Dynamic Range Imaging: Acquisition, Display, and Image-Based Lighting 2nd Edition

By far the most comprehensive book covering HDR topics. In my opinion the authors of this book represent a dream team in HDR expertise! I believe this book is a must if you are interested developing HDR applications.

From the other reviews about this book that came about via Amazon's Vine program, you might infer a possible problem when the book is a deeply technical exposition. Frankly, it was over the heads of several reviewers, several of whom admitted as much. So let's see what I can contribute.The subject of High Dynamic Range imaging exists mostly because of a simple observation. When you look with your eyes at a natural scene, typically outdoors in daytime, the dynamic range of the image can vary up to 5 orders of magnitude in intensity. But when the scene is captured and then displayed, the output page or screen can often only show 2 orders of magnitude. The latter is called Low Dynamic Range imaging. The conventional 24 bit RGB representation, which allocates 8 bits each to red, green and blue, is for LDR. The 8 bits in each colour channel is that 2 orders of magnitude variation.The book also explains clearly why 24 bit RGB is really effectively 8 bits or 2 orders of magnitude range. You might think naively that we have 24 bits of variation. But the text takes an example image, of an outdoors scene, and does scatterplots of red, green and blue pixel intensities against each other. They are strongly correlated. Which makes sense, when you realise that a pixel that is bright in red is often also bright in green and blue. The practical effect is that the information content in 24 bit pixels is actually much less than 24 bits. Which also explains why a mapping from RGB to other colour spaces that use 1 luminance channel and 2 chromatic channels is often performed. The latter 2 channels have much less information and so can be better compressed.Anyhow, the top level understanding of this book is to appreciate the discrepancy between the 5 orders of magnitude in an actual scene and the 2 orders in an output image. This impedance mismatch accounts for most of the book's complexity and length. Many of the algorithms strive to somehow capture more of the natural dynamic range and make it visible in the far more restrictive output.The book seems ideal for a colour scientist or engineer who wants a deep understanding of the optical interactions as well as the physiology of human image perception. It is not meant for someone who needs a quickie tweak of an existing software imaging package. Rather, the book helps explain the science behind those packages, which might be often way more intricate than can be appreciated by the typical users of such packages.You can see this for yourself by reading many of the other reviews. Most are cursory and utter drivel. Written by people who were clearly out of their depths in terms of understanding maths or science or engineering in the text. Several reviews were just a short paragraph of generalities. Written by people who got their books thru the Amazon Vine program and just needed to post a review to satisfy the Vine requirements. Basically so that they could continue to get more free books from Vine.

This text has an extremely narrow market (I cannot emphasize this enough). As mentioned by the publisher, this is intended for "R&D professionals and academics studying computer graphics, digital design and visualization." So, please do not purchase this text outside of these fields ... it will be of virtually no use to you. (As has been the experience here). Think of this as a graduate-level computer-science text (maybe that will scare you away). Please, do not go into this assuming it will improve your artistry as a photographer or filmmaker ... it will not. (This is almost exclusively for those involved in the nuances of the gaming industry).I noticed that there were inquiries into the updates to this text. I did a little investigating and found this note by the actual publisher, "Imaging brings a significant update, adding chapters on high dynamic range image capture (hardware and software), display devices, as well as image difference metrics and video. All existing chapters have been updated to reflect the current state of the art, ensuring the book's leading position as a reference text for those working with images, whether it is for computer graphics, film, video, photography, or lighting design." Hopefully this will help you decide if its worth the investment in purchasing the newest edition (however, I must speculate that if you are inquiring, from what I've seen, the changes are significant and well worth the purchase).-The examples are rich (the printer seems to have replicated the images with precision ... which is not always the case).-The text is well-supported.-The writers strive to make their material clear to the potential reader.This text truly is the benchmark for this field. The negative reviews are merely a result of misinformed purchases. If you are a professor seeking a new text (or, perhaps, some insight on the new edition) or R&D professional, do not hesitate in your choice. Those "in-the-know" already own the first edition ... consider this a successful update.

This is not a general book for photographers, but more so, for someone who wants to understand the math/science behind HDR processing.

My professor recommended it to me before I started my internship with his team.Reading this book really helped me understand important concepts related to computer vision and HDR imaging. I am not a computer engineering student and didn't know much about HDR photography. The book covered everything I needed to know to work with HDR in a computer vision lab.Explanations are clear and detailed. They use great pictures to make sure the reader understands.Thank you for this well made book.

Great book on HDR, it might be a bit expensive but features information that is not available anyware else I searched.