How to make a HDR photo and adjust its white balance

You are in front of a beautiful landscape. Shoot the scene and the photo comes out disappointing. Some parts of the photo are overexposed and white. Or some parts of the photo are underexposed and black. The solution to this issue is using HDR. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. It is a digital photography technique that merges several bracketed shots with different exposures into a single HDR photo. The scene in the HDR photo will look correctly exposed. Sometimes, after you get a HDR photo, you want to further tune the attributes of the photo. If the colors are overly warm or cool, you need to adjust the white balance to neutralize the color casts. In this article, I will show you how to get the jobs done with two pieces of photo processing software. One is an easy-to-use HDR photo creator that lets you make an HDR photo. The other one is a wonderful photo effects app that allows you to fix the white balance.

Part 1. Make a HDR photo with Photo HDR

As the title suggests, Photo HDR, developed by Vertexshare, is a piece of HDR photo software. Apart from fast creating a HDR photo by merging different exposed photos, it provides a comprehensive photo effect editing suite.

Launch the program and you will be greeted by a sleek and clean window. After you load photos into the program, the HDR technique will be applied to these photos. Click on "Next' and you will be taken to a new window. Here you can fiddle with a wide range of settings. This window is composed of three panels. A series of predefined special effects are located in the left-side panel. You can see the small preview thumbnails of these effects. The middle panel, taking up most of the window, is the preview area where you can preview the effects you apply to the photo. A variety of adjustment parameters classified in different sections are located in the right-side panel. You can change the exposure level by adjusting the brightness, contrast, and saturation. What's more, you can adjust the local contrast, tone mapping, and dynamic range compression. Besides, you can sharpen the photo, denoise the photo and mix the color channels. In addition, you are even given the possibility to boost the colors and definition using lab adjustment. Other parameters are vignette filter, graduated filter, vibrance, and soft light.

Photo HDR is a powerful HDR photo editing tool that enables you to apply various filters as well as preset visual effects to your HDR photo. It is a great go-to option if you want to quickly create an HDR photo and do some further enhancements on it.

Let's dive into the part of how to use Photo HDR to make an HDR photo

How to make an HDR photo with Photo HDR

Step 1.

• Drop three photos at different exposure levels into the box "Drag and Drop Your Photo here". You can also import the photos into the program by clicking on the "Add" button. You will soon see the HDR photo with the blended exposure in the preview panel. To remove the imported photos, click on the "Remove" button next to the "Add button".

Step 2.

• Click on the "Next" button. Press the "Save as" button to export the HDR photo to a desired location.

Part 2. Fix the white balance with Photo Effects

Photo Effects is another software product developed by Vertexshare. Similar to Photo HDR, it comes packed with a wild range of parameters and decorative objects to enhance the quality of your photo. Thanks to the simple layout and intuitive settings, Photo Effects can be easily handled by both novices and experts.

Let's see how to use Photo Effects to adjust the white balance of the HDR photo you get from Photo HDR.

How to adjust the white balance with Photo Effects

Step 1.

• Throw the HDR photo onto the working space. Or click on "File"->"Add Photo" to add your photo into the program.

Step 2.

• Navigate to the right-side panel and scroll down to the "WHITE BALANCE" section. Click on the "White Balance" button to activate the function of adjusting parameters. The parameters in this section are temperature, tink, and blue/red equalizer.

Temperature

This parameter is used to modify the colors along the blue-yellow axis. As the value is increased, the photo becomes more yellowish and looks warmer. As the value is decreased, the photo becomes more bluish and looks cooler.

Tink          

This parameter is used to modify the colors along the magenta-green axis. If you want to make the photo more magenta, increase the value. If you want to make the photo greener, decrease the value.

Blue/Red Equalizer

This parameter is used to control the ratio between red and blue. Increasing the value will make the ratio larger and increase the proportion of red. Decreasing the value will make the ratio smaller and increase the proportion of blue.

• Drag each slider to adjust the parameter to fit your needs. Click on and hold the "View" button to see the differences between the original photo and changed photo. You can also click on the "Compare" button to compare what the photo had looked like before you made changes with what it looks like after you made changes. If you want to readjust the parameters, click on the "Redo" button to discard the adjustments.

Step 3.

• Press the "Export Photo" button to export the photo to a desired location. Or click on "File"->"Save As" to save the photo into a destination folder.

Summary

Photo HDR and Photo Effects are nice photo processing tools that aim to enhance the visual aspect of digital photos. With the help of them, you can create a HDR photo by merging the same scene at different exposures and then fine-tune the white balance. The free versions of them leave watermarks to the exported photos. To get the photos without the watermark, shell out $29.95 respectively to upgrade the free version to the pro version. If you find other good software tools to handle the tasks in the future, please let me know by leaving a comment below.