DJI Go 4: How to Use AE Bracketing to Get the Best Aerial Photos

What is Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB)?

Any cam­era sen­sor has a lim­it­ed dynam­ic range, which means it can only cap­ture details of lim­it­ed bright­ness. Expo­sure is set at the time of shoot­ing to the mid­dle of this range, and details that are brighter or dark­er than the cen­ter of the range are also cap­tured.

Auto expo­sure is con­ve­nient, but when shoot­ing high-con­trast scenes, you can get embossed areas or vice ver­sa com­plete­ly black. These parts of the image at the edges of the dynam­ic range can be very dif­fi­cult to recov­er in post-pro­cess­ing. This is where brack­et­ing comes in handy. Auto expo­sure brack­et­ing allows you to take mul­ti­ple shots in a row with dif­fer­ent expo­sure set­tings. When you select the AEB func­tion in the DJI GO 4 set­tings, your air­craft will take 3–5 pho­tos at dif­fer­ent expo­sures. Thus, addi­tion­al frames will give more infor­ma­tion at the edges of the range and sig­nif­i­cant­ly expand it.

Shoot­ing using brack­et­ing is nec­es­sary for at least 2 rea­sons. First­ly, this com­pen­sates for the imper­fec­tion of the smart­phone screen, which can deceive you when choos­ing an expo­sure in bright sun­light, in the shade, and can also be dis­tort­ed by the screen bright­ness set­tings and a host of oth­er fac­tors that can pre­vent you from cor­rect­ly assess­ing the sit­u­a­tion and set­ting the para­me­ters. When shoot­ing with AEB turned on, you have insur­ance in case of a mis­take in the set­tings. The sec­ond rea­son to use AEB is the abil­i­ty to cre­ate high dynam­ic range (HDR) images. These pho­tos can be obtained by com­bin­ing sev­er­al frames with dif­fer­ent expo­sures.

How to Create an HDR Image in Photoshop

In this quick HDR pho­to tuto­r­i­al, we will use 3 images tak­en at dif­fer­ent expo­sures in Viet­nam — Ha Long Bay.

1. Open Pho­to­shop, then menu File > Auto­mate > Merge to HDR Pro. In the win­dow that opens, select the pho­tos you want to merge. Select “Select to auto­mat­i­cal­ly align source images” to avoid ghost­ing or ghost­ing.

2. Pho­to­shop will auto­mat­i­cal­ly com­bine the images and assem­ble them into an HDR pho­to.



3. Sav­ing the image in 32-bit for­mat will give you the oppor­tu­ni­ty to use the full range of tools avail­able in Adobe Cam­era Raw with­out los­ing image qual­i­ty.



Whether you’re com­pos­ing HDR pho­tos from mul­ti­ple images, or just using AEB to cap­ture the right expo­sure, DJI Go always deliv­ers the best shot.