Why use bracketing

Enfuse is a Lightroom plugin that uses some different algorithm to merge the photos. But again, it complicates the workflow. You can create HDRs through manual merging by using luminosity masks. This is the most advanced technique. The general idea is to generate masks using the luminosity values of the image. You can apply the changes only to the lights or only to the darks of the image.

The drawbacks are the editing time and the learning curve. Modern cameras have quite a large dynamic range. You can use a single shot and convert it twice with different settings. For instance, you have an image with very high contrast.

You open it in the raw converter, edit it for the darks, open in Photoshop. Then open the raw file a second time, edit it for the lights and open again. This way, you now have bright and dark images in the Photoshop.

Now you can either create an HDR using Photoshop merge or do it manually. Another type of bracketing is focus bracketing. Sometimes, the photo needs to have a wider depth of field than any aperture setting can provide. In this case, we make brackets with different focus points and then blend them together. To create bracketed images for focus stacking:.

The takeaway here is that you have no way of bracketing automatically with your digital cameras. Changing the focus involves some manual labour.

The script is very similar to the one we had for the other Photoshop blend. I found their algorithm a bit less reliable than for the HDR. The alternative for this kind of merge is manual masking. Modern cameras are great devices, and the technology has gone far.

In many respects, this is exactly what you are doing when using exposure bracketing — simply hedging your bets as to which of the exposures in a bracketed sequence will give you the best results. There is more to bracketing your shots than just wanting to experiment with your exposure range as widely as possible.

Since High Dynamic Range HDR images have been popular, exposure bracketing has been a way to capture all the dynamic range within a scene from the brightest to the darkest points. The different exposures are then merged to create one HDR photograph.

But what if you like the shadows in one shot, but perhaps the sky in another? Using Photoshop or another image editor, you can layer all three bracketed exposures into a single file, with the best exposure on the top. Using the eraser with different brush sizes or selection tools, you can brush away select areas to reveal the photos underneath. This is similar to using the dodging and burning tools, only you have more data to work with because of those multiple exposures. HDR is similar to that layered dodge and burn, only all of the images are typically merged together instead of selecting which part of which shot you would like to show.

HDR is a post processing technique, while bracketing is the shooting technique that makes it possible. You can read more about how to process a set of bracketed exposures for HDR here. With AEB, however, you have the data to choose whether dodging and burning or a full HDR merge will get you closest to the look you are going for. Actually, no. Bracketing a flash to adjust the intensity of the light with each shot can be just as helpful, or even more so, since manual flash involves a bit more guesswork than choosing exposure settings based on the light meter.

Why the controversy? Well, mostly and simply because many people who practise HDR overdo it to create images which are quickly identifiable as HDR images and many photographers judge that this is a cheap trick. I feel very strongly that photography can only be liked or disliked but cannot be judged in the ways people try to judge it. The most popular way to combine three or more bracketed images in the HDR style is a cheap program called Photomatix and this tutorial will show you more about how to do it.