DeutschComposing HDR Images
Use the HDR (High Dynamic Range) function to combine several photos with various exposure ranges into one photo. (This is also called "sandwiching.") This function helps alleviate the problem of limited exposure range on camera sensors, which manifests as great difficulties in satisfactorily capturing scenes with large differences in lighting, such as a dark forest on the bottom and a bright sky, or a room that is dark but for a sunlit window. A scene with such a large exposure range cannot be shot in such a way as to preserve the details in all parts of the scene. Thus the photographer is normally forced to "sacrifice" either the light areas or the dark ones.
If, however, the photographer has access to three shots that are identical except for their exposure - one overexposed, one underexposed, and one "in the middle," then they can resolve the problem, using HDR. ZPS then uses the most detailed part of each of these pictures and combines them to create a new picture.
Creating HDR Pictures
Although HDR is typically made up of three “partial shots,” sometimes two can suffice: a normal shot, and an underexposed shot (to fill in detail in light areas) or an overexposed one (to fill in detail in dark areas), or one underexposed and one overexposed shot. You can obtain source pictures by extracting them from RAW files.
The actual composition process is very easy. It's enough to just select the source photos and let the program assemble the HDR image on its own. You can reorder the source pictures by dragging and dropping them. In the next step, the HDR image is created. You can influence the results via several settings that affect how the source pictures will be translated into the result. There are separate settings for work with shadows and work with lights. You can set a transition threshold (a brightness level after which the underexposed/overexposed picture starts to be copied into the "middle" picture), a transition smoothness, and whether or not to apply an unsharp mask, which will make the edit bleed out into, and better blend in with, surrounding pixels, and an intensity, which sets the intensity ratio between the original picture and the "copied-in" one.