High-tech Lighting Techniques Bring Incredible Sharpness And Clarity To Images

Many people ask us just how we get our photos so incredibly sharp and lifelike. We use a system called "Enhanced Lighting Compression" or ELC, which is a group of technologies that we've developed over the last 5 years here at PrimeImage. Part of the system involves a process called HDR, a technique that has been in use for over 150 years.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, specifically High Dynamic Range Imagery. Basically, it's a digital technique that allows you to bring out the brightest brights and darkest darks in an image to accurately represent the intensity of light.

By capturing multiple images of varying exposures almost simultaneously, the entire light spectrum is captured. Then, using special software, the images are combined into one seamlessly developed picture.

What makes it even more interesting is that this technology was actually used back in the mid-19th century when Gustave Le Gray famously made seascapes showing the sky and the sea. Because the range of light was too great to capture with standard techniques at the time, Le Gray actually used two different negatives, one of the sky and one of the sea, and then combined them together to create the single picture.

However, it wasn’t until the early 1990’s that HDR took off among amateur and professional photographers. Thanks to the constant fall in price and rise in demand of consumer and prosumer level cameras, HDR is now something that almost anyone with a camera can achieve.

Although HDR video has been researched since the late 1980’s, it wasn’t until the early 2000’s that true attempts at it were made. In 2010, the independent film studio Soviet Montage released footage of HDR video created using a beam-splitter and two cameras. The effects are almost haunting, with the result resting in the uncanny valley of reality.

At PrimeImage, we took the basis of HDR and pioneered a type of imaging called Enhanced Lighting Compression (ELC) photography. Like HDR, ELC uses shots of multiple exposures to capture the varying light intensities of a scene. However, ELC also uses custom software algorithms and special techniques to bring incredible sharpness and clarity to images that can’t be attained with standard HDR. This custom technology helps to bring out the details that the human eye sees that are unable to be captured with other methods. Although ELC has been formerly used in both the medical and military fields, PrimeImage is one of the first companies to use ELC for real estate.

It will be interesting to see where HDR goes in the future. As technology progresses, what new forms of lighting compression will we see researched and developed? If you’d like to use ELC images for your business, drop us a line at 480.240.9270