RawTherapee and darktable are great apps, they’re both free and open source, and they give you much better options for compositing your HDR images. That covers everything you need to know to make a high-dynamic range photo in GIMP! GIMP is a great app, but after you try using it to make HDR images, you’ll probably agree with me that it’s not the best choice. RawTherapee can also be downloaded from the official developer’s website.īoth of these options are excellent methods for creating HDR photos, and they both offer much more advanced features and functionality than you’ll find in GIMP, such as auto-alignment for your bracketed images, custom tone-mapping, and full 32-bit color support. RAW images contain unprocessed data from the camera sensor, and this gives you unparalleled flexibility when it comes to the editing process – but GIMP can’t open RAW files natively without help from another app.įortunately, there are two free and open-source apps available for RAW image processing, and both of them also allow you to make HDR photos with ease.ĭarktable can be downloaded from the official developer’s website. To get the best image quality from your HDR images, you should set your camera to shoot RAW images. If you’re serious about working with HDR images, you will quickly run into the limitations of using GIMP with the method described above. You can try experimenting with different values in the Blend dialog window to tweak the results, but I strongly recommend that you use one of the free open-source apps listed below that have more modern approaches to HDR compositing. ![]() GIMP will spend some time working on your images and create a composite using your three images as individual layers in a single document.ĭepending on the quality of your source images and the exposure values of each image, you may be unhappy with the results. With the Exposure Blend script open in your web browser, press Ctrl + A (use Command + A on a Mac) to select the entire script contents, and then press Ctrl + V / Command + V to paste it into a blank text file in your text editor. If you’re on Windows, Notepad is the best choice. Visit the URL for the Exposure Blend plugin here, and then copy and paste the entire contents of the file into a basic text editor. This is an unusual method of adding a GIMP script, but it works. (If you want to read the short sad story of why the repository was shut down, there’s a quick note here on the official GIMP website. If you want/need to stick to a purely GIMP-based HDR workflow, here’s how you can download, install, and use the Exposure Blend script from a backup copy of the now-defunct GIMP Plugin Repository that’s hosted on GitHub. If you don’t want to bother spending time on this outdated method, I recommend that you skip ahead to the “Alternative Options for HDR Photography” section below to check out some other free and open-source options for making HDR imagery.īoth of the recommended apps can be used alongside GIMP as part of an HDR editing workflow, but they’re really standalone programs and not plugins, so you won’t really be making your HDR images with GIMP if you choose to use them. ![]() ![]() It takes a bit of time and effort to download and install, and it’s getting a bit out of date by modern HDR standards since it hasn’t been updated since 2009, but it’s the only automated HDR method I know of that actually runs within GIMP itself. GIMP doesn’t have a built-in system for creating HDR photos, but you can add the feature using a free script. This kind of computational problem is exactly the sort of project that computers excel at – that’s why we call them computers, after all. The best way to make a high-dynamic range photo in GIMP is to let the computer do all the hard work. Some cameras can automatically create up to nine different exposures in sequence by holding down the shutter button in bracketing mode, but this is a bit extreme and unnecessary for most casual photographers.Įvery camera is a little bit different, so check your camera’s documentation for how to use the bracketing feature or use your camera’s manual settings to adjust your exposure settings to create your bracketed images.īe sure to use a tripod when shooting bracketed images, or they may not align properly during the HDR merge process! Making HDR Images with a GIMP Script Using two images allows you to set one exposure for bright areas and one for dark areas, while using three images allows you to expose one image for shadow areas, one for mid-tone areas, and another for highlight areas. To create an HDR image, you need at least two images of the same scene with different exposure values, but most people prefer to use a minimum of three images for better tone representation.
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