MASTER MONO HDR

James Paterson shows you how to shoot and edit dramatic black-and-white HDR landscapes

- James Paterson

High dynamic range is usually associated with bold colours and eye-popping images, but less so with black-and-white photos. So if the colours are part of the draw of HDR, why would you want to use HDR for your mono shots?

HDR is about expanding the dynamic range to capture detail in the brightest and darkest parts of a scene, and, as you’ll discover in this video tutorial, this can be just as useful for monochrome images, which are all about tonality, as it can for colour. In fact, with mono HDRs we have a few advantages. The lack of colour allows for a subtler HDR treatment. What’s more, several of the traits of HDR – crunchy textures, bold clouds and enhanced shadow detail – can often look more natural in mono than in colour.

Black-and-white photography hinges on the play of light and shade across an image, and HDR can give us more options for controlling the lightest and darkest areas. It's especially useful for landscapes, where it's often a struggle to balance bright skies with the darker land; this is exacerbated in sunset scenes like ours, as the imbalance is increased, but by tone-mapping our HDR image, we can tease out details in the sky and the dark foreground.

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