Better Than HDR? Try Image Averaging for Better Results

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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[stevep]

Thank you. Love to see bright young people being so confident in what they do. A smart young man - good luck.

[dougsturgess]

Very interesting. Something I've learned about taking photos for exposure blending is for 99% of circumstances, as long as you have all the shadows & highlights captured in the histogram, just 2 images will be better than multiple. If the histogram contains all the information in shadows & highlights, the HDR will process great. The only time when you may need a 3rd is if you have such high contrast, a 3rd underexposed is needed. Try it & see. I used to take anywhere from 5-7 bracketed images for HDR. I get better results with just 2 most of the time. I've run into the artifacts with things moving before & didn't know how to handle it. Look forward to trying averaging.

You're a great instructor. Glad I ran across your site.

[britishrose]

How did I not know this earlier! The photos look far more natural than HDR. Thank you so much!

[ChristopherKemsley]

First off, I really appreciate that you got right to the subject of the video without 5-10 minutes of preamble - thank you! Secondly, this is really good to know. I've only recently gotten into HDR photography and haven't yet had (or, at least, noticed) those artifacts, but now I know what to look for! Do you know of good software to batch-average photos? You made a comment about workflows ... editing sets of 2/4/8 images at a time, one by one, in Photoshop is not a particularly-reasonable way to handle a photoshoot where I take tons of photos...

[DavidStella]

This is honestly an underrated technique! Can't wait to try it out.

[tonyjin]

Great video! I personally tend to swear by median when there are moving people, since you can make them disappear completely rather than just reducing their opacity to 25%. When there is moving foliage, I tend to use a selective blending technique where only one frame is used in moving portions (so long as the noise is manageable).

[MOAB-UT]

Great tips for capturing moving. I use exposure bracketing which is what I think you are talking about. Do you know if AFFINITY Photo would let me do image (aka exposure) averaging?
Thanks!

[Namaste..]

Very clear explanation. Always find your videos helpful. Many thanks!

[shengyetang]

Very interesting Spencer. I just did some test with my 5D mark III. I took 32 under exposed image of a high dynamic range sceene, then stacked them, and then open ACR in photoshop. When i revcovered it with exposure slider or shadow slider, the result was much better than single shot, however there were still many noise and stripes in the shadow.
1:Clearly, with my 5D mark III, Image Averaging is not exceptable at this kind of high dynamic range sceene.
2:Exposure blending is the best option at most situation, if anything moving, then we can choose Image Averaging.
3:Does my test result concerned to ISO Invariance?

[StephenJWalter]

Great video and a new idea for me to mull over. Came across this video while looking for information on HDR, which I’m just about to get into. I’ll certainly add averaging as an extra technique to play with.

[vikassaraf]

Your content is gold! Just beat the YouTube algorithm and u are gonna groww like crazy!!

[NataliaSkorokhod]

I didn't have an internet connection for the past few days, so glad to finally be able to watch this!

This technique is really cool, I actually didn't know about it. I used to work a lot on manually fixing HDR artifacts :D

[leond]

Hi Spencer, thanks for this video. I'll often bracket for a range of exposures and then select the one that's easiest to work with. I have never heard of image averaging. II'll definitely give it a try.

When you state better results, I assume you're referring to the noise (or lack of) in the shadows?
One of my questions was exactly what Ricardo asked. Why not just make copies of the original image. Thanks for the explanation.
Do you always use a tripod when image averaging? Or are you able to get satisfactory results shooting hand held?

[csc-photo]

Excellent presentation skills & helpful info, thanks Spencer! Question - how does a single 14-bit RAW image compare to image averaging, in terms of noise & range? Not sure if you're shooting RAW in this vid (forgive me if I missed this detail).

[quincylee]

hmmm...I'll give this a try for lunar photography and see how it compares to the HDR process. Thanks for the video!

[thomastuorto]

Thanks for the vid. I don't have PS so didn't know about this. You don't think manually Exposure Blending multiple stacked layered photos is any good. More work but most likely worth it from what I have seen online. Thanks for any replies.

[MichaelABruce-ewzs]

Well if their high-definition images are looking like that? They're doing something wrong. It's not the HDR.

[pretenderfishing]

Great video. I use image averaging a ton for night images, but hadn't thought that the same premise works for shadows in daytime images. I'm wondering if some hybrid of image averaging with exposure blending might be the best of both worlds.

[christophermason]

Very useful. Thanks. I have a blue hour HDR I’m really struggling with some weird purple ghosting in the trees. I’ve loads of shots that are not over exposed so I’m going to try this.

I have paintshop pro ultimate and they have a photo blend app built in for removing moving objects. So I am thinking I will take 8 frames remove all but one frame around the edges of the trees.

Again, this looks like a really good idea.
Thanks

[martinchambers]

Thanks for this. Very interesting! What effect do you think noise reduction software like DxO Prime would have on the each image before you took the image average, given the process you describe? Would this help or make things worse?