Create HDRS with Canon’s gear
Digital Photo Professional can automatically merge different exposures
You don’t have to use a camera’s built-in HDR options. As long as you have three separate exposures of a subject, then you can combine them via the HDR Compositing Tool in Canon’s free Digital Photo Professional 4 software. They don’t even have to be Raws, as JPEGS can also be merged in this way (but you will get better results when you use Raw files).
You’ll find the HDR Compositing Tool under ‘Tools’ in the top menu. Once you’ve selected the images, you need to decide if you want them to be aligned or not. You can lose a bit of the image area if you choose to have them aligned, but it can fix any slight shift in framing between the separate shots caused by the camera not being stationary.
Then you let the software do its thing. The advantage of using DPP 4 to carry out the compositing work is that you get a large preview and a handful of parameter sliders that allow you to adjust the brightness, saturation and so on. If you just like the Hdr-look, you can even run a single photograph through the HDR Composting Tool, and fine-tune the result using the sliders.
There’s another recent HDR addition to DPP 4 – HDR PQ. You’ll find this under the ‘Configure basic image settings’ tab (the one with the cog icon). This displays a wider range of brightness levels that can be achieved with an SDR (Standard Dynamic Range), and enables you to produce a wider tonal range from a single Raw image rather than having to combine exposures. If you’re using an SDR monitor to edit your images, DPP 4 will try and replicate how they would be displayed in HDR PQ on an HDR display.
Only a few cameras can currently take advantage of this new feature, including the EOS R5, EOS R6 and EOS 5D Mark IV, and the function will be greyed out for shots taken with most other models.