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Photography vocabulary · Files & Image Quality

Dynamic range

Meaning in photography, with examples

nounCommon term

In photography, dynamic range means: The range of brightness, from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights, that a camera can record with detail, or that exists in a scene.

In Turkish: dinamik aralık

How it is used

Measured in stops. Camera reviews compare dynamic range, and photographers say a scene, such as a dark room with a sunny window, has too much dynamic range for one exposure. Solutions include bracketing, HDR, graduated filters and flash.

Example sentences

  1. Modern sensors have so much dynamic range that you can recover a lot from the shadows.

  2. The interior has a huge dynamic range, so I'll bracket five exposures.

Common collocations

  • wide dynamic range
  • high dynamic range
  • sensor dynamic range
  • stops of dynamic range
  • HDRShort for high dynamic range: a technique that combines several photos taken at different exposures into one image with detail in both the shadows and the highlights.
  • histogramA graph that shows how the tones in a photo are spread out, from pure black on the left to pure white on the right.
  • clippingThe loss of all detail in the brightest or darkest parts of an image, which become pure white or pure black.
  • RAWAn image file that keeps almost all the data recorded by the sensor, without the camera's processing. It must be edited and converted before sharing.
  • sensorThe light-sensitive chip inside a digital camera that records the image. It does the job that film did in older cameras.

More terms: Files & Image Quality

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