Using AE bracketing to reduce noise and improve image detail

andrerav wrote:

Recently I've been shooting with AE bracketing and learning how to use Hugin (which is free and open source) to blend frames. The main purpose was initially to improve the dynamic range when shooting in certain challenging conditions.

However, what I also discovered is that similar to the techniques used in astrophotography there are some really nice benefits to be had with regards to noise reduction and detail. I'll show you what I mean with an example.

This is a single frame from my X-S10 (demosaiced and denoised with Iridium and rendered with a neutral profile from RawTherapee):

And here's an exposure fused from 3 single frames with Hugin (the above frame was one of them) and then post processed to enhance contrast in RawTherapee:

I think this is a very interesting technique, and I am planning to do some more experimentation to see where I can expect diminishing returns with regards to the number of frames. I can already say that there is a further notable improvement in detail and image quality with 5 frames.

Eager to hear if anyone else is using bracketing for this purpose and what your workflows and results are like.

That image doesn’t look like it would benefit much from exposure bracketing at all, but combining multiple identical images will indeed null out some noise. It’s been my experience though, that motion/alignment artifact problems tend to outweigh any noise reduction benefit you might get from stacking multiple images of a scene like this. A single well exposed RAW typically never presents a noise problem for me, but I can see stacking a very low light static scene, but not something like this.