Project Gotham Racing 3 (PGR3) HD HDR 1920×1080 widescreen wallpapers

I just love the photo-taking options in console games. It was probably kicked off in style by Gran Turismo 4 which was brilliant because it generated a higher resolution image that the game ran at (the game ran at 640×480 on NTSC and slightly higher vertically on PAL but the photo renders were 1280×1024 or 1024×1280).

The nice thing about photo modes in console games is that they are much more than a simple screen capture. They allow you to position the camera and adjust various photographic properties. Xbox 360 launch title PGR Project Gotham Racing 3 has a nice photo mode and was probably the best-looking of the first wave of titles. It also renders photos at a slightly higher resolution than the game runs and produces 1280×720 pictures which can be uploaded and accessed over the Internet.

I used it to produce this 1920×1080 HD wallpaper of a Jaguar XJ220:

Jaguar XJ220 1920×1080

Very nice, but then it then struck me that, because one of the photographic options is exposure, it would be possible to generate photographs that could be combined to make a HDR photo. An HDR photo is made by digitally combining several different exposures of the same shot.

These are the differently exposed originals of a McLaren F1 jumping next to The Triangle Building in Tokyo:

  

These were combined to produce the follow 1280×720 HDR photo which was then enlarged and tweaked to produce a 1920×1080 HD HDR widescreen wallpaper.

McLaren F1 1280×720

McLaren F1 1920×1080