HDR Merge and tone mapping in Affinity

Tone mapping is a very powerful tool for handling scenes with a brightness range too high for a single exposure to capture

- Rod Lawton

HDR has long been used to merge a series of exposures, but you don’t always have to end up with the kind of super-saturated, hyper-detailed images that can sometimes give HDR a bad name. You can use the HDR Merge and Tone Mapping Persona in Affinity Photo 2 to produce these dramatic HDR effects, but you can also use it to create much subtler tone mapping effects where high-brightness range scenes can look completely natural.

Our sample image demonstrates a typical exposure problem that HDR techniques are designed to solve. In this scene, we can expose for the shadows but lose detail in the highlights, we can expose for the highlights but just get inky-black shadows, and if we use an exposure somewhere in the middle (our ‘before’ shot here), we don’t really see much detail in either. The solution here is to merge these exposures in Affinity Photo. Our walkthrough shows how this is done, and some of the powerful tools available in the Tone Mapping Persona once the exposures are merged.

But that’s not the end. The Tone Map panel is also useful for single images. Very often, you can capture the full brightness range of a scene in a single raw file, and your main problem is how to make it look effective by balancing up, or tone mapping, this wide range of tones. The process is the same, except this time you select a single raw file in the New HDR Merge window. Affinity Photo will go through the same merge process, even though there’s nothing to merge, and will open the image in the Tone Mapping Persona as before.