HDR photo from several exposures

An online tool for merging photographs of one scene taken at different exposures. It lines up hand-held frames, decides per pixel which exposure holds that part of the picture, and writes both an ordinary JPEG and a gain-map HDR file that brightens on displays with the range to show it.

How to merge exposures into an HDR photo

Add the frames

Drop in two to nine shots of the same scene at different exposures. They are sorted darkest to brightest and labeled with how far apart they are.

Spot a duplicate or a stray frame

The list shows each frame’s exposure and size. Two frames with the same label usually means the same photo was added twice; a different size means one of them is not from this bracket.

Merge

Alignment and movement removal are on by default. Turn alignment off only for a tripod set you know is identical.

Take the HDR file, or the plain one

Download the HDR file for screens that can show it, or the plain JPEG or PNG. The HDR file opens correctly everywhere either way.

Combine a bracket into one frame that keeps both the window and the room

Drop your exposures here

JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC ·

Add two to nine shots of the same scene taken at different exposures — or a single photo to give its highlights room.

Exposures

Settings

Align hand-held frames

Finds the shift between frames and crops to what they all cover. Turn it off only for a tripod set you know is identical.

Remove movement

Where something moved between frames, one frame decides what was there, so a passer-by appears once instead of three times.

Features

Both ends of the scene in one frame

Exposure fusion picks, for every pixel and every size of detail separately, the frame that actually holds it. On the test bracket the window went from fully clipped in two frames out of three to no clipping at all, while the interior kept the detail of the brightest frame.

Hand-held brackets line up

Frames are registered by median threshold bitmap, which compares shape rather than brightness and so is not confused by the exposure difference. On the test set it recovered every shift exactly across a four-stop spread.

Someone walking through is removed, not smeared

Where frames disagree, one of them decides what was there and the others are re-exposed to match it. That keeps all three exposures working in that spot, so the region does not turn into a differently-lit patch — measured at nought extra copies against two without it.

A file that is HDR, not a picture of HDR

Output is an Ultra HDR JPEG (ISO 21496-1): an ordinary photograph that every viewer already opens, plus a gain map telling capable screens how much brighter each region should go. On a display with no headroom the pixels are bit-for-bit the ordinary version.

Two to nine frames, or just one

A bracket of any depth is merged. A single photograph has no hidden detail to recover, so it gets only the highlight headroom an HDR screen can use, and the page says which of the two happened.

No exposure data required

The brightness relationship between frames is measured from the pixels by matching histograms, so files stripped of EXIF by an editor, screenshots and re-saved JPEGs merge the same as camera originals.

What goes in and what comes out

In: JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF and HEIC, all frames at the same resolution. Out: an Ultra HDR JPEG carrying both renditions, plus plain JPEG and PNG. Rotation recorded by the camera is applied while reading, so a portrait bracket from a phone stays upright.

What a bracket holds that one photograph cannot

A camera records about eight or nine stops of brightness in one frame. A room with a window in it spans more than that, which is why the window goes white when the room looks right, and the room goes black when the window does. Three frames at different exposures between them hold the whole scene; the merge decides, region by region and detail size by detail size, which of them was telling the truth about that part of the picture. The reconstruction of the actual light is accurate to a median of 0.04 stops on the test scene, and under a quarter of a stop in the window — the region no single frame holds at all.

Questions about merging exposures

Do the frames have to be shot on a tripod?

No. Hand-held frames are registered against each other before anything is merged, and the result is cropped to the rectangle every frame covers — so a few pixels are lost at the edge where your hand moved. What alignment does not recover is rotation: if you twisted the camera between frames rather than shifting it, the overlap check will say the frames do not match.

Someone walked through while I was shooting. What happens to them?

One frame is chosen as the account of what was in the scene, and wherever the others disagree with it their pixels are replaced by that frame’s content re-exposed to match. The person therefore appears exactly once, in the position they had in the chosen frame, and the spot still gets all the exposures — so it does not end up lit differently from everything around it.

Why does the result look the same as an ordinary photo on my monitor?

Because your monitor is showing you the ordinary photograph, which is exactly what the file contains for a display with no extra brightness to give. The HDR version rides along as a gain map and is applied only by a screen that has the range for it — most phones made since 2023, and recent laptops. The note under the preview says which case you are in.

Can I use one photo instead of a bracket?

Yes, and it is worth being clear about what that does. A single photograph has no recorded detail in its blown highlights, so nothing can be recovered there. What it gets is room: the top of its tonal range is re-seated so a bright sky or a lamp is rendered bright on an HDR screen instead of flattening to the same white as a sheet of paper. Everything below that is left untouched.

How far apart should the exposures be?

Two stops between frames is the usual step and three is common for interiors. What matters is that the darkest frame holds the brightest thing in the scene without clipping and the brightest frame holds the shadows — a window in daylight against a lit room is roughly six stops, so three frames two stops apart only just cover it and five frames cover it comfortably.

Can I bring RAW files?

Not yet — the frames must be something a browser can decode, which means JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF or HEIC. Exporting a bracket from your camera or converter as JPEG loses some of the latitude a raw file has, though far less than you might expect, because the merge is recovering range from having several frames rather than from the depth of any one of them.

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Who is this tool for?

📷 Photographers

Published 12 Sep 2026 Author: The Supreme