How to shoot and edit HDR images with your drone
Capture your best landscape shots ever with a simple technique that will revolutionize your aerial photography with images bursting with detail.
Drone photography often focuses on landscapes, a genre of photography known for producing high quality images with detail throughout the scene. But with a single image in a high-contrast scene, the drone’s camera sensor may only be able to capture detail in the shadows and midtones, or the highlights and midtones. And this is where HDR comes to the rescue.
HDR, or high dynamic range photography, is a technique used to capture detail in a scene, from the brightest highlights through the midtones to the deepest shadows. This is accomplished by taking three or five bracketed exposures, which are then stitched together in Lightroom into a single image where detail can be recovered. The result is images that look like they were shot with ND grade filters, which are often used on mirrorless cameras and DSLRs to balance a bright sky’s exposure with the darker ground. The results can be amazing, so let’s see how it’s done…
If you are looking for a new drone to take stunning HDR photos with, we have a range of articles to help you with guides on best drones, best beginner drones and best camera drones.
shooting steps
Capturing bracketed shots for HDR is incredibly easy as most drones offer a capture mode called AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing). With this mode set you choose how many exposures are required and this is usually three or five. Once the exposure is set to the “medium” exposure in the drone app, the drone will take an underexposed picture or two, a medium exposure, and then an overexposed picture or two.
1. Fly into position and compose
Use a smartphone app like Drone Assist to make sure it’s safe and legal to fly at your chosen location. Once you’ve identified a takeoff and landing spot, fly the drone into position and use the flight and gimbal controls to compose your shot. Turn on the rule of thirds grid and histogram to aid in composition and exposure. You can now hover the drone ready to fire.
2. Line up and shoot
Shoot in Raw and set ISO to between 100 and 400, choose an aperture between f/2.8 to f/5.6 if your drone has an adjustable aperture, then set the shutter speed for a correct one Exposure for the midtones on. If your drone has a fixed aperture, simply adjust the shutter speed. Next, set the camera to three- or five-exposure AEB mode, and the camera will capture the shots with a single press of the shutter button.
Shooting tip
Most drones can only take landscape photos, but you can take vertical panoramas that can be stitched together in Photoshop to create a portrait (erect) image. If you are capturing a high-contrast scene and want to create a portrait orientation image, you can combine bracketing for HDR with vertical panoramas for portrait orientation HDR images.
processing steps
Using Adobe Lightroom to merge bracketed shots for HDR gives excellent results that look completely natural if you don’t force the settings too much. Once the three or five bracketed shots have been merged into a single image, Lightroom creates one large DNG file that contains all of the image data from the bracketed shots. This allows you to recover detail from the shadows and highlights.
1. Merge engagements
Import your raw files into Lightroom and select your exposures by clicking on the first one, holding down Shift and then clicking on the last image. Right click on the selected images and go to Photo Merge > HDR. When the dialog opens, make sure Auto Align and Create Stack are checked and Auto Settings are unchecked. Next, set Deghost to High to combat ghosting issues, then click OK when done.
2 Process your image
A new HDR DNG is created in a stack above the bracketed shots. To restore detail, drag the Shadows slider to the right, then the Highlights slider to the left. Now use the black and white sliders to reduce the washed out appearance in the image by dragging the white slider to the right and the black slider to the left. Now you can make all the necessary standard adjustments.
3 Apply local adjustments
It may not be possible to recover all the details using only the Exposure, Shadows and Highlights controls on the Basic tab, so local adjustments are required. A graduated filter was used here to darken the sky. Click the mask icon below the histogram and choose Linear Gradient before dragging the guide over the desired area. Now you can make further adjustments only to this masked area.