Can you combine HDR with long-exposure landscape photography?
Asked 2/22/2013
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I often see landscape photos with blurred water or clouds from long shutter speeds, but also with sky and foreground detail that looks beyond a single exposure. Is it possible to create HDR images from long exposures, or blend a long-exposure foreground with a properly exposed sky in post-processing? If so, are there any limitations compared with standard HDR, especially when parts of the scene are moving?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
13y ago
2 Answers
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In principal the HDR methodology can be applied to exposures of any length. However longer exposures are more likely to contain motion which can cause problems for automatic exposure blending programs.
One commonly used solution is to manually blend the exposures by masking. Whether or not this counts as "HDR" since it doesn't involve creation of a high dynamic range intermediate image is a rather pointless debate on semantics.
Here's an example of manually blending exposures in landscape photography to overcome movement, original frames:
Building up the image by masking in successively brighter frames towards the foreground:
Originally by user1375. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1375
13y ago
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Yes. HDR techniques can be used with long exposures just as with short exposures. The main issue is not shutter length itself, but motion: waves, clouds, foliage, or changing water blur differently between frames, which can confuse automatic HDR merging and create artifacts.
Common approaches:
- Shoot multiple exposures and merge them as HDR.
- Manually blend exposures with masks, which is often preferred in landscapes when movement makes automatic HDR unreliable.
- In some cases, a single RAW file may contain enough dynamic range to recover sky and foreground detail and then be tone-mapped, giving an HDR-like result without true multi-exposure HDR.
To create different exposures, you can vary shutter speed, ISO, aperture, or use ND filters. Aperture changes depth of field, so it’s usually the least desirable variable for HDR bracketing. If using shutter-speed bracketing, taking the shortest exposure first can help reduce motion-related problems.
So yes: long exposure plus HDR or exposure blending is absolutely possible. The practical limitation is subject movement, and manual masking is often the cleanest solution when automatic merging struggles.
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