Reveal the tonal details of your photos

Combine multiple exposures to create a High Dynamic Range image

REQUIRES

Affinity Photo

you will learn

How to shoot, import, align, and merge bracketed photos into a fine–tuned HDR image

IT WILL TAKE

15 minutes

When faced with a high– contrast scene, your camera will struggle to reveal detail in the brightest highlights and the darkest shadows. On Auto mode it may meter the scene to reveal sky detail, plunging a backlit subject into silhouette. If the camera meters to reveal detail in the shadows, the sky will be overexposed.

To try to capture detail in both the shadows and the highlights, your iPhone’s Camera app has an HDR mode. This snaps three separate shots — one shot captures an average exposure, revealing detail in both the shadows and highlights. A second shot brightens the scene to reveal more shadow details. A third shot darkens the scene to capture extra detail in the brightest highlights. Your iPhone merges the correctly exposed areas of the three shots into a single HDR photo, and this image displays detail in the shadows, midtones and highlights.

The Camera app’s HDR mode can produce some effective results, but there can also be problems if any objects in the scene move during the three consecutive exposures. This can cause moving objects to become blurred — an artifact known as ‘ghosting’. Combining multiple exposures in Affinity Photo helps to avoid this.

To shoot photos that are suitable for Affinity Photo to merge into an HDR image, you could use a DSLR camera that has a bracketing mode. This mode enables you to shoot three separate bracketed exposures that capture detail in a scene’s shadows, midtones and highlights.

You could also shoot separate exposures on an iPhone by tapping on the areas that you want to expose for. You then merge those shots in Affinity Photo, and use its tone–mapping tool to create a composite image that features detail in both the darkest and the brightest areas of your finished image. George Cairns