Lightroom HDR Merge

While I’m not a fan of the HDR craze and I seldom use HDR effects to get the grundy or over processed look to my images, I do find opportunities when the HDR functionality comes in handy to keep an image that might otherwise have ended up in the bit bucket.

I recently started to sort through the hundreds of images I brought back from my trip through Romania and Serbia last year (yes I know… it’s almost a year since I took that trip and I’m just now sorting!)…   I did bracket many of the images as I often found myself in mixed lighting either in downtown streets, at dusk or in parks with lots of tree coverage.  I could only hope that one of the exposures was what I needed.  The multiple exposures I take are generally not intended for HDR processing, and I pick the best exposure and toss the other two away.

However this image proved to be different.  None of the three images I captured had a tonal range that was worth attempting to recover just the one image in Lightroom, so I thought it might be a good candidate for the Lightroom HDR merge.

Here are the results.  I really like the final image.  It doesn’t scream HDR.  I did apply a little adjustment to the sky afterwards.  I have an adjustment brush I used called “Water-Sky” which is a combination of Highlight -50 and Dehaze +20 which I applied with at graduated filter about half way down the image.  I also applied my standard processing settings (for tone, clarity, HSL for blues and oranges, sharpness and noise reduction) and I selected the auto lens correction all after the HDR was rendered.

Bucharest_0409-HDR

Here are the original three images.

Bucharest_0408 Bucharest_0410  Bucharest_0409

#TerriButlerPhotography, #photography, #Lightroom, HDR

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