Forget about Photoshop, you can use Microsoft Excel to make HDR photos

No matter if you love or hate HDR, you have to admit that creating an HDR photo in Microsoft Excel sounds… Well, unordinary. Maybe even impossible. Well, in this highly amusing video, a young scientist and amateur photographer Kevin Chen explains how you can create an HDR image in Microsoft Excel.

As Kevin explains in the video, photographers will tell you HDR is a good way to retrieve some details in the blown out highlights and dark shadows. Also, business people will tell you that the right tool to implement your solutions is always Microsoft Excel. He thought about this and came to the conclusion that he should try to solve his photographic problem in Microsoft Excel. And as weird as it sounds, he actually did it.

In his presentation, Kevin explains the steps he took to create an HDR image in Excel. A lot of math backs it all up, and I must admit it’s not really my area. But thanks to Kevin’s fun demonstration, it’s an interesting video to watch nevertheless.

Kevin converted the photo to black and white for this experiment. He inserted a lot of data into Microsoft Excel and used conditional formatting to get the shades from black to white correctly. He did it seven more times to get photos of different brightness, and after that Excel started using 13 GB of RAM, so he had to reboot his computer to continue working.

After a lot more math and calculations, he got the HDR image in Microsoft Excel. Here’s the final result:

I found this idea really amusing, along with the funny presentation. Still, there’s too much math for me. I think I’m gonna stick to Photoshop after all.

[!!Con 2017: HDR Photography in Microsoft Excel?! by Kevin Chen via Reddit]