How to HDR Tutorial

Hi All,

As the bad weather in Sydney continues, I managed to have free time to edit some drone images I took at Lilli Pilli. And explain the HDR method.

As my drone is the first generation of the Dji Mavric Pro series, the image quality is not the best straight from camera especially the depth of field, capturing shadows and over exposed areas.

So I like to use something called the HDR (High Dynamic Range) method. Taking 5 photos with different exposures and merging the photos.

There is 2 ways of creating HDR photo using your drone:

Letting the drone do all the work for you
- Go to your phone that is connected to your controller, press settings (in Yellow)

- Press 'Photo' > HDR Shot
- Make sure the 'EV' (Exposure Value) is close to 0
- Press the shutter button

The drone will automatically take photos with different exposure, merge them together and save one jpg image.

Full control of the individual images as an output for post production - make sure you shooting in RAW
- Go to your phone that is connected to your controller, press settings (in Yellow)
- Press 'Photo' > AEB (3 or 5)
- Make sure the 'EV' (Exposure Value) is close to 0
- Press the shutter button

The drone will automatically take 3 or 5 (depends which value you selected) photos with different exposure. The drone will save the 3 or 5 RAW individual images on to your memory card

- Go to Lightroom, import the 3 or 5 of the same images with different exposures 
- Pressing CTRL and clicking on the individual images with different exposures > Right click 
- Press Photo Merge > HDR
- Select auto align and auto settings > Press Merge

Lightroom will merge the images and will create a new RAW file. And then you can edit it further as you please.

The below images are taken using the HDR method.

Sit back and enjoy Lilli Pilli from the sky.

📍 Lilli Pilli

✈️ Dji Mavic Pro

📷 Boats, clouds and river and surroundings

📸 Adobe Lightroom Classic