Creating an HDR photo with movement in the frame

Sunday 12 June 2022, 13:31 by Nando Harmsen | 5,530 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Creating an HDR photo from an exposure bracket can be very easy. A few presses of the button and you have an HDR image. But movement in the frame does not always produce the result you want. In this article, I show how I edit a photo of the Opal Coast into an HDR image.

It can be that easy. Put the camera on a tripod, set automatic bracketing, turn on the self-timer, and the exposure bracket is done. Merging the images is just as easy with Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Photomatix, Aurora or Nik HDR Efex. Until there is movement in the photo.

Movement makes it difficult or even impossible to align everything in the photo perfectly. You soon get ghosting, or ghost images. In most cases, this is unwanted. Except when it involves water, because that can look good.

Photographing on the Opal Coast. Relatively easy in these conditions. That changes when it also has a very large dynamic range, such as during a sunset.
With moving water, the movement is averaged out between the photos, making it look as if you used a longer shutter speed. Even so, there are situations where this produces unwanted effects.

The photo I took during one of my long-exposure masterclasses on the Opal Coast is a good example.

The situation

The photo was taken during sunset, with the tide going out, which is quite important because the difference in height between low and high tide can be as much as 9 metres. The difference in brightness between the sky and foreground is so large that the camera cannot capture it.

You can capture this dynamic range in multiple photos with an exposure bracket. That is what I did, using shutter speeds ranging from 1/10 of a second to 4 seconds. The aperture and ISO were kept the same.

The unedited images from the exposure bracket in Lightroom Classic. With one press of the button, I can create an HDR image from these.

Merging in Lightroom Classic

I merged the five photos in Lightroom Classic into an HDR image. Of course, you can also use the software packages mentioned earlier for this.

If you do not take the movement into account, you can see how the movement of the water is averaged out. There are two problems, though. First, the water does not look the way I want it to, and second, an ugly spot has appeared in the reflections of the light.

The movement of the water has been merged into this mush. That is not really a striking long-exposure photo. It needs to be different. I also have strange spots in the reflections of the sunlight.
If I choose to enable ghost removal, I have to wait and see which photo Lightroom Classic uses to remove the ghosts. There is no control over this. In this case, Lightroom Classic chooses a dark photo and lifts the shadows. The result is a lot of noise in that part of the image.

If Lightroom Classic has its way, this is the water I get with ghost removal. I do not want that at all. I want the other water because it looks better.
Unfortunately, this is not the look I want for the water either. I do not like the shape of the wave. But there is one photo in the exposure bracket with a fantastic section of water, and that is what I want to see again.

So the HDR function does not work in this case. The solution is to use layers and masks in Photoshop.

Merging in Photoshop

For this method, I first edit the photos into a preliminary result in Lightroom Classic. I then send all the photos to Photoshop. They are automatically placed in layers if I choose that option. This option is available in Lightroom Classic.

With layers and masks, I can now show the parts of the photo that I want to show. The water from one photo, the rocks from another, and the sky from yet another photo. This lets me decide for myself what the photo will look like, rather than leaving it up to the software.

The layers and masks I made in Photoshop from the edited photos from Lightroom Classic. I did not use all the photos from the exposure bracket either. That was not necessary.

The photo the way I want it

By working with layers and masks, you have complete control over merging the photos. You can work with a brush in a mask yourself, or use luminosity masks, but the principle is almost the same.

The final result of merging the photos from the exposure bracket. This is what I want to show.
This way of merging an exposure bracket is of course not always necessary. When there is little or no movement in your photo, the need is much lower and a normal HDR merge can work perfectly.

But when there is movement, this method gives you much more control over the final result.

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