What is Exposure Bracketing and How to Use It – Definition & Tutorial
Last Updated on November 22, 2021 by Peter Wood
You can see landscape photographers take the same picture with different exposures. Later, you can merge those bracketed photos into a new HDR image. Instead of using Photoshop and other professional HDR merging tools, you can blend different image parts and replace them with original image data. That’s the main reason why people use exposure bracketing.
If it is the first time you see the word exposure bracketing, you can get a quick brief here. This article will show you what it is and how to use exposure bracketing photography. Moreover, you can quickly blend pictures with different image exposures into an HDR image with ease. Just read and follow.
Part 1: What Is Exposure Bracketing
You can see a set of images exposed correctly, slightly underexposed, and overexposed. Sometimes cameras cannot capture the same as human eyes see. It is also a common way to take photos in tricky lighting conditions. A tripod is required to get the best exposure bracketing result. No matter how you hold your camera, it is easy to create movements. Thus, do not take moving elements with exposure bracketing.
It is supported to take bracketed exposures automatically. Most cameras have an auto bracket option. Once you can set frames and ranges between each stop, you can start auto bracketing quickly. The auto-exposure bracketing is a good choice for handheld shooting. It will be easier to align bracketed images. As for manual exposure bracketing, you can get much more flexibility. You can gather more dark and bright image data by pushing your camera from here to there.
You can process the bracketed photos into HDR and compositing exposures. You can get artistic effects and utilize tone mapping from HDR images. If you want to get a realistic result, you can combine bracketed photos into digital compositing instead.
Part 2: How to Use Exposure Bracketing
Then here comes the problem, how to do exposure bracketing? Just mentioned before, you can take bracketed exposure manually or automatically. Use a tripod to place your digital camera. Take a picture first. Later, you can take a second picture with different exposure compensation, shutter speed, or ISO. After that, you can adjust the shutter speed or ISO two stops in the other direction to take the third one. That’s the way to take underexposed and overexposed pictures.
Or you can take bracketed exposures automatically. There are AEB settings in your camera. It may differ from brands and camera types, such as Bracketing, Exposure Bracketing, EB, or more. Just set the darker and brighter areas. Since you have completed the exposure bracketing setup, you can hold your finger on the camera’s Shutter button. Later, this camera can do exposure bracketing in 3, 5, or 7 frames automatically. You can get a set of exposed pictures with different shutter speeds.
Some people may wonder whether it is possible to make exposure bracketing with your iPhone device. Well, the answer is Yes. You can turn your iPhone into a digital camera to take pictures. Later, use an iPhone bracketing app called CameraPixels to do bracketing. Choose the image bracketing types between the Exposure bracket and Focus bracket. Set the image count and EV step based on your need. After that, you can create an exposure bracket on iPhone without too much cost.
Part 3: How to Blend Bracketed Photos
After knowing the skills of shooting bracketed exposures, you can create an HDR image with your bracketed shots. By using WidsMob HDR, you can turn exposure bracketing images into sharp HDR in a short time. All you need to do is import 3 different bracketed photos into the HDR maker. Later, the program can create amazing HDRs automatically. Despite the auto HDR creating effects, you can get ghost reduction and tone mapping technology to enhance photos as your eye see or even better.
1. Combine a set of bracketed JPEG and RAW images into HDR.
2. Auto-align bracketed exposures captured by handheld cameras.
3. Create HDR images with moving exposure bracketing photos, such as cars, clouds, animals, people, and more.
4. Customize tone length, tone saturation, brightness, and ghost suppression with easy-to-use sliders.
5. Adjust the color opacity and other HDR photo parameters to get the best HDR result.
6. Get a live preview of full-resolution HDR photographs.
Step 1: Fee download WidsMob HDR on your Windows or Mac computer. Launch the HDR photo editor after the installation. Make sure you can save your bracketed photographs on your computer. Or you need to plug the camera’s SD card into the computer to extract.
Step 2: Click Import to add 3 bracketed pictures into WidsMob HDR. Click Import to replace images if necessary. Click Next on the lower right corner. And the HDR editor will make HDR photography automatically.
Step 3: You can see the current HDR image data in the main interface. During this time, you can move sliders to edit the HDR effect with Tone Length, Tone Saturation, and Brightness and Ghost Suppression. If you are satisfied with the HDR result, you can click Save to export the HDR photography. Or you can click Next to make further edits.
Step 4: You can make your HDR picture look better by adjusting those options in this HDR editing window. At last, click Share or Save to export your HDR image. You can export the high dynamic range picture as JPEG, TIFF, or PNG format.
When do you use exposure bracketing? Well, you can take a series of images in different conditions. With the same object in light and dark areas, you can merge photos into an HDR to get the artistic effect. This article mainly talks about exposure bracketing and HDR. What’s the difference between them? As for exposure bracketing VS HDR, they are not in the same type. HDR is an image processing technique, while exposure bracketing is a camera shooting method. HDR is similar to overexposed bracketed images. That’s all for exposure bracketing definition and processing.