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What is HDR photography? High Dynamic Range explained while hiking Garibaldi (Tutorial)
What is high dynamic range (HDR) and how do you use it? This is what this video is all about! I explain all this while hiking Garibaldi Lake, probably the nicest hike around Vancouver, Canada. I started by explaining the theory behind HDR photos and the reasons when you should consider taking some. I then take a few examples and I finish the tutorial by jumping into Lightroom to show how the post-processing is done.
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good morning everybody so today we're hiking up dairy Bobby and I want to talk about why you should be making HDR's if you like for the draft you might be asking yourself now what is HDR HDR stands for high dynamic range and the range is very different on every single camera you buy so the best cameras usually have better dynamic range so by my range I need the brightest point in a picture before it becomes overexposed and also the lowest point or it's under expose so these two points form the dynamic range of a camera [Music] HDR is a technique that allows to extend the range of photos by usually taking three different shots at three different exposures [Music] of some good use case for each there is like right now underneath the trees because the sky is really over exposing the trees tend to be underexposed so it's really hard taking a shot that is just right [Music] we just got to the lake and the view is simply amazing look at this [Music] now let's talk how to capture an HDR shot so you probably need a more professional camera like this one if you're only taking pictures with your cell phone your cell phone is probably already doing HDR for you so for example the pixel phone takes 10 pictures and I found this a similar technique to get better shots with different exposures so if you open your menu here you should have your exposure settings here where you can change the exposure compensation so if you turn this dial it's going to move it around it might be a little different depending on your camera both my camera is gonna have are gonna have this setting but now if you go onto that around on top that's how it works for my camera so if you come here and you turn around the style you're gonna see it now we have three different exposures here so usually I'm gonna go around minus 2 and plus 2 so that means it's gonna take one shot at the normal setting one shot with minus 2 exposure and one shot with the plus one exposure so you're probably also want to enable your burst mode so that's gonna take three shots really quickly and by taking these shots really quickly you're going to avoid having things that change between every single shot we're gonna make it easier afterwards when you need to merge the shots together [Music] so here I'm gonna try and take a picture of the rocks in front and the mountain in the back and you can actually see that the white of don't snow really reflects a lot of light but that the trees right beside don't reflect as much so here HDR is really gonna help bringing up the light back from the trees and also keep detail inside of the snow so you've probably heard the free very rapid shutter bursts so this is actually what's taking the picture so it took three pictures if we look at damned is one that's underexposed and there's one that's overexposed and there's one that's rightly exposed right now [Music] [Music] [Applause] it's ice-cold wait I think I'm gonna come you made me want to try it [Music] I hope the quality is not too bad my smoke pocket died and I have a battery pack but I forgot the cable so I'm using my cell phone [Music] [Music] we go around this mountain here and then climb up to see the lake there are people on top of that mountain there yeah I know you know we're going there just getting better this is crazy so we're actually heading right to the top here I'm getting so exhausted right now but I'm almost to the top finally got to the top the view is just amazing Wow I'm so tired we still have lunch so Trevor how good is this [Music] when you get to the tallest mountain in his LT sure it's crazy we're just fighting down way more easier that hike was really exhausting when we got to the top we didn't realize that we still had about 15 kilometers to go back down and we didn't have a lunch with us so we didn't eat anything except our breakfast and a few muffins we brought along so I didn't take any pictures or video going down I was just trying to get down as quickly as possible because at that point we were completely exhausted so now let's go have a look inside of Lightroom so our first one selective free shots that we have here so if we open them there's one that is supposed to be correctly exposed when it's underexposed and one that scoober expose so now let's select the free shots right click here go in photo merge and then select HDR merge so now I might take a few seconds for it to merge together I already did it before so this one was really quick so if we here we have a few settings so the first one is a total line you want to leave that pretty much all the time because I'm going to do a really great job of taking the pictures even if you move between each shot after that I usually leave Auto settings on to make sure to have a good base when I start editing the picture and then we have our digo settings this can help to remove things that move between the shot and only keep one of them so here we also have an option to show the d ghost announcer if you click on it just going to be red that's gonna appear and show where they did the correction on the picture usually you don't want to go too high with the D ghost settings because if you go to the end a lot of noise are gonna come back into the picture so you probably don't want that in the end so we're gonna click merge and wait a few seconds for the picture to get merged so now the picture is ready it created a stack with all the pictures so we can go forward and unstuck it to see all the pictures so here we have a final shot and we have our free original shots right behind them so if we open up here and look at this picture we see it's way better we have way more detail inside of the trees here we also have the nice highlights from this character the blue from the sky so we have all the information from the shot I already edited the shot so I'm practicing come here and paste my settings on the picture and we're gonna see right away the effect so we have here a lot of information inside of the shadows but also we're keeping the information in the highlights and this is the beauty of an HDR picture now some people might say if we look at a pic but the settings here I'm pushing the highlights and the shadows pretty hard so I could try doing the same thing on the original shot so this was the one that was well exposed but if I'm going to see here if we're not doing in each picture for something like that and we really push the shadows to extremes is the noise that comes inside of the shot so here we can clearly see there's a lot of noise in the shadows because there was not enough light to allow to get the details inside of it but if we come back to our HDR shot here the details are way better and we don't have any more or as much noise we had before which is very acceptable as a final shot now let's move to the next shot so for the next shot I already put the mitigators and when you look at this one if we copy this Andy's here and go to the next shot that also has the same settings pasted we're going to see they look pretty similar at first so you might say why would you take an HDR picture in this case like I said earlier in the video it's actually really great for the highlights in the snow so if we look at this shot that is not HDR shot that's just a normal a single shot we look at the mountains here we do have some detail inside of snow and around but it's really overexposed overall now if we come here and dish HDR shot we see that we have way more detail inside of the snow we can actually really see the details and the rocks coming out through the snow and it's not completely overwhelmed so as you can see you probably shouldn't be using HDR for every single shot I actually only take two to five percent of my shots using HDR and 95% of my other shots are using normal shots from the camera and that's because the camera already has a really good high dynamic range but in some cases it can help like for example here inside of the trees we can really get the detail out from the shadows and keep the highlights but most of the time I would stick to just using a normal picture which is going to do the job just fine Indian if you like this video please leave a comment below to let me know what you would like me to cover in the neck next once I may be doing more and more for the graphic related videos in the coming weeks and as always please like subscribe and share this video with your friends if you're into photography see you in the next one [Music] you
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What is this video about?
I've been curious about HDR for a while now, and I figured the best way to really explain it was to go out and show you exactly how it works. So I packed up my camera and headed to Garibaldi Lake for what turned out to be a pretty exhausting but absolutely beautiful hike.
First, let's break down what HDR actually is. HDR stands for high dynamic range, and it's all about pushing past the limitations of your camera's sensor. Every camera has a limit—the brightest point it can capture before things blow out to white, and the darkest point before everything goes black. That range is your camera's dynamic range. Some cameras are better than others, but they all have limits. With HDR, you take three shots at different exposures and blend them together to extend that range and pull out detail that would otherwise be lost.
The real magic happens when you're shooting in tricky light—like at Garibaldi, where the snow is reflecting tons of light while the trees in shadow are barely visible. A single shot forces you to choose: expose for the sky and lose the trees, or expose for the foreground and blow out the snow. HDR solves that problem.
On a professional camera like mine, it's pretty straightforward. You set your exposure compensation dial to bracket your shots—I usually go minus 2, normal, and plus 2. Then enable burst mode to fire off three shots rapidly. This speed matters because it minimizes the chance that something moves between frames, which would make merging harder later.
Once I got home, I jumped into Lightroom to show you how the magic happens. You select your three images, right-click, go to Photo Merge, and choose HDR Merge. Lightroom handles the alignment and blending, and you get options for ghost removal and auto-tone adjustments. The result is a single image with information from all three exposures, giving you detail in both highlights and shadows that would be impossible to recover from a single shot.
That said, I don't use HDR for everything. Honestly, I probably only use it for about 2–5% of my shots. Your camera already does a pretty good job on its own most of the time. But when you need it—when the light is genuinely too difficult for a single exposure to handle—HDR is an incredibly powerful tool. The before-and-afters speak for themselves.