How To – Exposure Blending

Exposure Blending is a technique for blending multiple exposures of the same scene into a single image.  This technique involves taking several shots of the same scene or subject with different exposures and then fusing these shots into one perfectly or almost perfectly exposed photo.

This tutorial works with Nikon cameras with live view and NCC version 0.7.165 or higher. I don’t find any good example in my house so i used a souvenir. The goal is to make a well exposed image.

Step 1: After we start the application we need to start a new session (1) and add a name for it (2) and a folder name where the application save the taken photos.

Step 2: Taking test shots and composing the scene.

Step 3: Creating photos with different exposures. Select bracketing.

Select check boxes for desired EV values (1), like -4,-2,0,+2,+4 and hit the Start button(2). For this may do more try for better results. For best result it is indicated  to set camera mode to "A". 

Step 4: Select all images using context menu or selecting one by one using checkboxes on images thumbnails.

After that using same context menu starting utility for exposure fusion(Actions->Enfuse Images). This option start a utility application named enfuse (http://wiki.panotools.org/Enfuse), same application can be used for focus stacking. 

Enfuse options: All checkboxes should be unchecked if you want to speed up the process you can down scale image (2). Most important setting is the Exposure (2) this slider sets the relative weight of the well-exposedness criterion. Increasing this weight relative to the others will make well-exposed pixels contribute more to the final output. For other options see the enfuse wiki.

And the result : 

Single shot image

Combined image