HDR VS FILTERS
There are several pros and cons to using ND grads as opposed to HDR and vice versa, so the best option for you isn’t necessarily clear cut
Dynamic range is the ability of cameras to capture detail throughout the tonal range between pure black and pure white. Dynamic range is largest at the base ISO – the lowest setting which is typically ISO 64, 100, 160 or 200 depending on the camera model and manufacturer. Modern cameras can capture a dynamic range of around 14 stops or more, which is incredible. But even with this impressive range, ND grads or HDR remain essential for capturing detail in both the sky and the foreground in high-contrast landscape situations.
Comparing ND grads and HDR for extending dynamic range, the main advantage of using screw-in or magnetic polarising and ND filters with HDR bracketing is that these two filter options are much smaller than square filters so they take up less space in your kit bag, they’re much lighter and considerably less expensive. So, if you’re on a budget and/or you want to keep weight down, this approach wins hands down. The downside is that you have to shoot more exposures which means more shutter actuations, you have to store more image files on your hard drive and you have to spend more time processing your images.
Using square filters provides a huge amount of flexibility because you can stack more filters together effectively to achieve the desired effects with exposure and/or colour. And since this is all achieved in-camera, editing time is greatly reduced.Plus, capturing ultra-long exposures with 6- and 10-stop ND filters is much easier because when you’re shooting bracketed exposures the overexposed shots can become incredibly long, which means that you have to manually time exposures in Bulb mode. For example, if your base/ midtones exposure was one minute with a 10-stop ND and you wanted to capture five bracketed shots, the longest exposure would be a whopping 16 minutes with the previous exposure being four minutes – a practically unworkable situation.
Comparing the results
To put these two approaches to extending dynamic range to the test, two scenes were captured; one was a relatively static landscape, while the other was a seascape with a small amount of movement present in the tide to see how this type of movement is handled. For each software option, only the tools available were used with all processing applied in that software to stay in line with the controls a typical user would have available to them.
The results from the seascape exhibit the most differences between the three software options and the filter-based versions, but the more static landscape is much more consistent. The colour balance of the images is slightly different in all of th
