Create HDR in Lightroom
If you are using Lightroom6 or CC, you can create stunning HDR photos!
HDR (High Dynamic Range) is a way to get more highlight and shadow details in the photo. Cameras are not strong enough to capture all the details in one single photo. You may have noticed that you set you your camera setting for one part of the photo, and you loose details in another part. This is very common problem when taking photos in a cloudy day, the foreground is clear but the clouds are not shown. Creating HDR photo is the way to have everything in the photo.
Before, you need to use Photoshop to process and create HDR images, now in Lightroom 6 or CC, you can create HDR image in just few simple steps. Here are the steps to create HDR:
- Step 1, you need to take few photos with different exposure from the scene. Here is the first photo, as you can see the shadow details are shown like the tree on the left side, but the clouds are over exposed.
The second image, I shot with reducing the light one stop. Now the mid tone details are shown, but still the clouds are slightly over exposed.
in the third image, I reduced the light one more stop and now the highlight details can be seen like the clouds.
- Step 2, open the photos in Lightroom library, select all 3 images and go to Photo -> Photo Merge -> HDR
- Step 3, Lightroom creates a preview of the HDR image. By clicking the Merge button, the 3 photos are merged into one image which includes all the details captured in each of the 3 images. The new file has DNG format and you can edit it in Lightroom to create a better photo.
Below is the example of the 3 images shown above.
