How to Make an HDR Photo in GIMP with the Exposure Blend Plugin

HDR photography has become very popular over the last few years and I'll show you how to make an HDR photo in GIMP in this step by step tutorial. If you're not familiar with HDR, the acronym stands for High Dynamic Range and refers to producing photos with a wider range of lighting than a digital camera can currently capture in a single exposure.

If you've ever taken a photo of people stood in front of a light sky, you'll probably have seen this effect with the people appearing to be well lit but the sky being near to a pure white. If the camera produced a photo with the sky appearing with its true color, you would see that the people in the foreground looked too dark. The idea behind HDR is to combine the two photos, or indeed many more photos, to create a new photo with both the people and the sky correctly exposed.

To make an HDR photo in GIMP, you need to download and install the Exposure Blend plugin produced originally by JD Smith and further updated by Alan Stewart. This is quite a straightforward plugin to use and can produce a relatively good result, though it's not as rounded as a true HDR app. For example, you're limited to just three bracketed exposures, but this should be sufficient in most cases.

In the next few steps, I'll run through how to install the Exposure Blend plugin, combine three different exposures of the same shot into one photo and then tweak the final photo to fine tune the result. In order to make an HDR photo in GIMP, you'll need to have three bracketed exposures of the same scene taken with your camera mounted on a tripod to ensure that they'll align perfectly.

• HDR Photos with Exposure Blend GIMP Plugin
• Install the Exposure Blend Plugin
• Run the Exposure Blend Plugin
• Adjust Layer Opacity to Tweak the Effect
• Increase the Contrast