Crimmy

Hi! Sorry, been a hectic week. Thanks for the advice and help - I had tried JPEGS too, but with less success than you, I have to say. I will give it a go with them again! Thanks for all your help

Hi again James - I've just uploaded them to that dropbox link, the RAWS and JPEGS, SOOC.

Ok, thanks!

Its the Lake District, northern end I've tried JPEGS too, without much success. Good to know about the raw pipeline, thanks. I will do so, thank you - I'm guessing thats a private moderator dropbox or something? Thanks for the welcome I will put them up in the drop box when I get home, thanks - is it the same as the one James posted?

Thats right - sorry, the upload didn't work quite as I had expected. Possibly - but other software is able to deal with it. The shooting conditions aren't the issue, I know that the results I want are obtainable and the files aren't lacking the data; its extracting it in Affinity which seems to be the problem. The photos did encompass the tones I wanted, yes. I've tried that - it can make it a little worse and a little better, but that sun halo is still present and blown out no matter what I try. Other tone mapping variants all have the awful halo, and the random gradient to white on the right hand side. I will upload them when I get home. I went with screenshots because I was a little used to forums being limited in how large attachments can be, and only just realised that the upload limit is quite considerable! If I upload them into this thread, can people download them from here?

bump (now that the images have been approved)

Hi There, I recently got Affinity for its support of HDR, and photo stacking for star stacking (although this is a much lesser concern). I had taken some photos over the weekend, and wanted to try and edit them, so I loaded them up into Affinity's HDR function and let it have at it. I've attached a few photos - the initial result is the one called Affinity_tonemapNatural. Then I tried various things thinking it was the settings, and disabled tone mapping (the photo called Affinity_notonemap). It looked a bit better, as it didn't have the weird gradient off to one side, but the sun rays were still awful. I tried uploading JPEGs instead of RAWs, as I had seen some tutorials where people did that, but with no luck. Finally I thought I'd try a different piece of software, just to see if it would work, or if I had screwed up taking the photos - but it came out perfectly (or certainly good enough to edit further - this is the photo Photomatix_result). So, how can I get those kinds of results with Affinity? Any help would be much appreciated! My camera is a fuji X-T3, and I was shooting in RAW + JPEG. The attempts I have attached were done with the RAW files. The camera was on a tripod, and it was a merge of 3 photos - one underexposed by 3 stops, one normal, one overexposed by 3.