Zoner Photo Studio 12 Professional Edition

Zoner Photo Studio helps you take control of your photos. Acquire pictures from your camera, organize your archive, and edit and share your photos—it’s never been easier!

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HDR Pictures

The HDR function (High Dynamic Range) function serves for assembling multiple photos with various exposure levels into a single picture.

This sometimes is called “sandwiching.” HDR function helps solve the problem of the limited exposure range in the optical sensors of digital cameras, which makes it impossible to satisfactorily capture a scene with large lighting differences, such as a dark forest in the bottom of a picture and a bright sky at the top, or a dark room where a window is flooded with light. Using ordinary techniques, some scenes cannot be captured with such wide exposure ranges in a way that seizes the details in all portions of the scene. In these situations, a photographer is typically forced to sacrifice detail in either the light areas or the dark ones.

By taking three photos, each with a different exposure levels—underexposed, overexposed, and “in the middle”— you are able to take advantage of HDR. Zoner Photo Studio is able to make use of the part of each picture that has the most detail and assembles a new picture with all the detail.

Creating HDR Pictures

HDR pictures typically use three component photos, however, two photos can also be sufficient to capture the desired detail: standard exposure joined with an underexposed shot to reveal detail in bright areas; standard exposure joined with an overexposed shot to reveal detail in dark or shady areas; or an underexposed shot combined with an overexposed shot, depending on which extreme(s) you wish to catch.

With Zoner Photo Studio, you can also automatically obtain the necessary source files for HDR pictures by extracting them from RAW files. Thanks to their 16-bit color depth, RAW files contain a greater brightness range than normal JPEG photos.

The actual assembling of the pictures is very simple. Select the relevant shots in question and the Zoner Photo Studio will attempt to arrange them appropriately. Manual arrangement of the shots can be done by dragging and dropping them with your mouse. The HDR image is now created; it is ready to be fine-tuned using various settings. The settings for bright areas are independent from the settings for shady areas. The transition threshold (i.e. the brightness level beyond which the under/overexposed shot will begin to modify the resulting picture) can be set, as can the transition smoothness and a mask to use on the transition area, and the intensity level (the correlation between the original picture and the resulting one).