I’m doing one more set of photographs today, this time to illustrate the HDR (High Dynamic Range) capabilities of the Panasonic Lumix LX5 camera.  Again, as with the other two posts I’ve done recently, I’m not going to go into a detailed discussion; I just want to post a few photos I took today with the LX5. The first image below shows the scene taken in Program mode with normal settings, just so you can see the challenge that was facing the camera in terms of bright and shadowy areas.

The next image shows the same scene, but with the LX5 set to the shooting mode called “My Color,” and to the setting called High Dynamic within that mode, which is what the LX5 uses for an in-camera HDR setting. As you can see, the camera did a pretty fair job of evening out the bright and dark areas, so you can see the colorful spools of yarn a lot better than in the first image:

Finally, the bottom image is a composite created in Photoshop CS5. For this one, I took six images, all at f/5.0, at shutter speeds ranging from 1/160 second to 0.8 second; some of them were very underexposed, some fairly normal, and some very overexposed.  I used the Photoshop command “Merge to HDR Pro” and tweaked the results until I got a look that I liked.  With this Photoshop command, you can take the same images and end up with wildly different results, so the image below is just one possible way to show an HDR-like view of this subject: