HDR is one of the post popular photography styles. Thanks to pioneers like Trey Ratcliff from Stuckincustoms.com who has practiced and promoted this form of photography style for years.

So if you are new to HDR I suggest you check out Trey’s Free HDR tutorial but those who are curious HDR is the process of taking multiple exposures either 1 or 2 stops apart and then combining these images using HDR software on the computer.

This post is about HDR and is a continuation of my series of the X-T1 where I have shared previously this camera performs for portraits and travel.

Fuji X-T1 has a dedicated button that let’s you quickly switch into Bracketed mode, no hunting around in the menu systems for this option. The tricky part with the X-T1 is that although it does let you take bracketed images Fujifilm has put this feature as more of an after thought which means it’s very limited.  All you can get is maximum bracket of -1, 0 and +1 stop exposure. Typically this is not considered ideal for any HDR imagery. You at least want 2 stops of difference if you are taking 3 exposures.

This limitation however doesn’t stop me. As I am shooting always in RAW format the files I get have lot of detail in them. Even if I take the +1 exposure and push it to +2 I don’t see any noise or degradation in the image. Heck I can even push it to +3 and it’s still good. X-T1 has very good dynamic range in the shadows so you can push the image quite far but lacks details in the highlights. So if you have slightly overexposed highlights then you can probably forget about recovering that detail later in Photoshop or Lightroom.

My process is to ensure that the Highlights have some detail in the underexposed image. Then I can combine and create the final HDR image on the computer using Photomatix Pro or 32-bit HDR with Photoshop.

However I would love if Fujifilm were to add some additional features related to HDR. Such as ability to increase the stops and have 5, 7 image bracket. As most of this is just a software limitation so a firmware update can sort it out.

Here are some of the results I’ve managed to achieve with this camera.