First of all what is HDR?

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.  That’s Wikipedia’s definition on HDR; in fewer and simpler words you have to make three or more pictures of the same subject using different exposures and using a rendering software such as Adobe’s Photoshop you “mix” all the images into a new one for a great visual effect.

Without a good camera you can’t really make good HDR images and that’s why more and more people search for ways to make fake HDR images from only one picture made with a regular camera.

Method no.1

open the image in Adobe Photoshop

duplicate the layer

go to image/Adjustments/ and desaturate the layer (make it black and white)

go to image/Adjustments/invert  (make the layer negative)

apply a gaussian blur filter to the layer (play a bit with the value)

then set the layer to Overlay  and you’re done.

That’s the easiest way to fake and HDR image.

Method no.2

open you image in Photoshop

this step is very important:

go to image/adjustments/shadow/highlight and use the following values:

shadows amount:50%, tonal width 45%,radius 44px;

High-light amount 67%, tonal width 65%, radius 46px;

The values may vary but it’s only a fine tunning

Duplicate this layer and set it to Color Dodge, this will give you strong collors and make the light colors pure white.

Duplicate the layer again, make it linear burn, select black as the foreground color

go to Select/Color Range and set the Fuzziness at about 100

click the mask button from the bottom of the layers window

To correct the noise just select the mask and apply a gaussian filter.

Now you have to duplicate the last layer and make it Overlay, then select the mask and pres Ctrl+i to invert

now all you need to do is play with the opacity for every layer until the image si just right. i can’t give you any values because every image is different….

I don’t know how many of you know already about this, especially those of you that don’t live in the US, but i think this is a very important subject for our tech blog.

OK! So what is Verichip? Well, Verichip was until now a tiny RDIF chip that used to be implanted in pets as a digital under skin TAG, but now Verichip has the FCC approval to be used on humans as well. Some companies in the US have already requested their employees to have the Verichip implanted and probably more will join this Big Brother style of tracking their employees.

Officially there are lots of reasonable applications for this RDIF chip but you can’t stop thinking of all the privacy issues that could come with this.

We’ll show you a video material from CNN that will explain more on this issue!

Multi-touch from Microsoft

The research team from Microsoft has come up with a really interesting way of communicating with your computer, using only a nice piece of software and a regular webcam. This application can sense what the background and the foreground of the video is allowing the use of gestures for a completely natural user interface.

This is really cool because if this software will be developed even further and released to the public you won’t have to buy a new computer or a new screen with touch or multi touch built in it, you’ll only need a webcam that most of us already have on our computers.

This is one of the so many products Microsoft is working on right now for the way we’ll see UIs in the near future, the only thing i can think of right now is what kind of products hide behind the research team from Apple, and how long do we have to wait to see something like this for personal use.

Here is the video: