HDR vs Exposure Blends
The below is an excerpt from my most recent newsletter, which goes out 2-3 times per month. If you like getting these sorts of tips and insights in your inbox, you can subscribe below. Thanks!
I posted a video last week announcing the new update to Luminar Neo (linked here), and in the video I did a demo of an exposure blend, using the new merge layers feature in Luminar. I received a comment, asking me to explain the difference between an HDR image and an exposure blend. I figured you might be interested in that as well. I have received that question quite a few times over the years, so I thought it made sense to share here for everyone to see.
Here is what I said (and this was specific to HDR Merge in Luminar Neo):
“When you merge to HDR, it does the blending for you and uses tone-mapping to seek a more balanced distribution of light. You don't have control over any of that until the merge is done, and then you can apply filters to adjust as needed. When you manually blend, you are doing it yourself and picking which parts of each photo you want to show in the final image. It is a higher dynamic range image, but not a true HDR because it's not using tone-mapping. It's generally called a blended exposure or exposure blend. When HDR became synonymous with "overcooked" a number of years ago, a lot of people moved to exposure blending to avoid the tone-mapping, although Luminar's HDR Merge does a great job of providing natural results so I still use that pretty often.”
I’ve been doing HDR since about 2008 or 2009, and still love it. But it’s not for everybody, and it’s not something I would do on every image. Once you get your arms around layers and get comfortable with masking, you open up a lot of new possibilities with your edits. One of them is exposure blending, which will give you a higher dynamic range image without the tone mapping or “HDR look”. It can be quite useful, that’s for sure.
