Almost every photographer knows about HDR. But is there a better technique to accomplish the same result? I’d argue that there is. Image averaging doesn’t get as much attention as HDR, but in a lot of common situations — especially when there’s something moving in your photo — it ends up working a lot better.

When I was coming up with the idea for this video, I was surprised to see that this technique has never been mentioned anywhere else I’ve seen online. Let’s change that! If you know any other photographers who use HDR a lot (and/or complain about ghosting artifacts in their HDR photography), feel free to share this technique so they can improve their photos.

One thing that I mentioned in the video but didn’t elaborate on is the issue of anti-ghosting settings in HDR software. You might think that my big complaint about HDR (that it doesn’t work well with moving subjects) is irrelevant when you turn on anti-ghosting. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, while the anti-ghosting settings usually do a good job eliminating halos around moving subjects, they introduce strange patterns of noise instead. You may not notice this in every photo, but when it shows up, it can completely ruin the shot, and there’s no way around it. (See the crop at about 2:11 of the video.)

Image averaging doesn’t have this problem at all. Instead of weird halos or unnatural patterns of noise, it just mimics a slightly longer shutter speed. To my eye, at least, that looks far better.

Of course, it’s up to you if you want to use the image averaging technique in your own work. If you’re the type of person who routinely shoots 9-image HDRs, it’s probably not a useful replacement, because you’d need to average way too many photos to get 9 stops of shadow improvement. But for standard 3-image HDRs, it’s a fantastic replacement, and nowadays I hardly even use HDR any more for landscape photography.

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Here is all the photo equipment I use: https://bhpho.to/3XUv32a

And here’s my video gear to film this video: https://bhpho.to/3Yt8th1