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Filter mode for bracketed photo series (HDR)?

Feature Request

Thanks for a great culling application. For my landscape photography I rely a lot on bracketed photos (HDR) where the camera takes a series of three or five photos in a burst with one underexposed, one "normal" exposure and one overexposed in order to capture highlights and shadows. I use Affinity Photo later to merge the photos into one HDR photo. However, culling these shoots is a real pain as there are always three (or five) identical photos in the grid, where only one of them are normally exposed and suitable for comparing with the next normally exposed photo in the next bracketed photo series. I would love to be able to filter these type of shoots in order to more quickly compare the normally exposed photos for each bracketed series, so I can choose which series to go forward with. Perhaps it is possible to filter based on image timestamp and exposure compensation together, or to analyze the scene so that OptiCull understands these are bracketed photos of the same scene and only show the normally exposed one? I am not sure, but this would be extremely useful. Thanks again!

Posted by ypp9y2mnxs ·
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Comments1

  • Shailesh - DopeAI

    •

    Apr 16, 2024

    Thank you for the feedback and for sharing your HDR use case.

    It seems that the process of stacking and merging HDR photos should ideally occur before the culling step. Doing so would allow OptiCull to handle a single image per HDR set, improving scene detection and selection accuracy.

    I understand your concern likely stems from the lack of an automated feature in Affinity Photo to batch-process HDR candidates based on timestamp and exposure compensation, a functionality that Lightroom currently offers.

    In the future, I can consider adding a feature that detects HDR sets as a single photo in OptiCull and includes all images from these sets during export. However, this becomes somewhat specialized for a culling app, especially when batch processing is already available to most users.

    That said, I am planning to introduce Advanced Filters that leverage camera and lens metadata, such as camera model and lens model. Additionally, including a filter based on exposure compensation is a thoughtful and relevant enhancement.