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HDR Images

Lesson 13 from: Photo Editing in Lightroom Classic for The Photo Enthusiast

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

13. HDR Images

Learn how to make realistic looking HDR images in Lightroom Classic to make difficult photographic situations easier.
Next Lesson: Masking Pt 1

Lesson Info

HDR Images

when we're out in the field sometimes we run into a situation where the brights are too bright the shadows are too dark and we can't get our camera doesn't have the latitude In order to capture that dynamic a scene. And so we take 34 or 5-10 pictures however many um some really dark to capture the highlights and some really light to capture the shadows and everything in between. Now. Generally speaking I just use three that's enough. Um and I turned my camera on to HDR mode which is it's a Canon R. Five. And so if you just turn it on HDR mode you can actually turn it into an auto HDR mode. So it just chooses how wide the dynamic ranges and then it chooses the shutter speed accordingly. Um You just got to make sure that you've got your camera locked down or you've got the I. S. O. High enough that you can get decent shutter speeds out of it while your hand holding it. And I do a lot of hand holding. And so you see this image right here is a handheld image. I'm not I don't have it on a t...

ripod. I just turn it into HDR mode and I hold down the button and it takes three really fast successive images. One of them is bright, one of them is middle and one of them is dark so that we can get the entire dynamic range of the scene so you don't have to have a tripod to do HDR but you do have to make sure that you're doing HDR mode so that you don't have to keep changing the scene. So if you have to manually change it, make sure you're on sticks so that you don't move the camera. But if you're gonna be hand holding, make sure that you're in an HDR mode or a bracketing mode that automatically takes all three pictures successively in different exposures so that you don't have to monkey with anything. All you're gonna do is hold your camera and go bam bam bam, just like that bam bam bam, that's all you want to do. Just push the button and hold it and get your three shots and be done. And then it'll, your camera will usually create a Jpeg to show you what it looks like. But it will keep the three raw, make sure that it's going to keep those three raw images because those are the ones you're going to actually use the Jpeg is just for your informational purposes. Did that work? Is it sharp, that kind of thing. And then you'll go back and use the original Raws. So here we are with the original Raws and I'm going to go into the grid and I'm just by hitting G and then I'm going to highlight all three of those images, I'm gonna right click and I'm going to photo merge HDR when I do that. It's going to give me some options on the right hand side and you can see that. It's already showing me what it's going to look like. It's done a good job of stitching it all together, even though the water is slightly moving, it can figure that out and it can stitch it together. Um, I've told it to auto align, I can also tell it to auto settings, which means it's gonna show me a pretty good approximation of what it thinks it ought to be, which is fine. Um, and then de ghosting if something's moving and you tell it to ghost, it will actually look for things that are moving and it'll plot out which version of the image it should use in order to make sure that that thing's not repeated three times in the image. And it does a really good job at it. I've actually taken pictures of my kids running through a field and I did an HDR and it actually chooses one of the images to put the kids in and then it uses the other images to get the exposure of the entire scene. And when you're finished, it actually merges so that the kids are just, there's one set of kids running through the field and the rest of the field is empty. So it's not like a blurry set of kids. So it does a really good job. It's mind boggling that it can actually do it, but that's what ghosting is. And in this case we don't have any ghosting, but I am going to ask it to create a stack and I'm going to click merge. The amount of manipulation you can do to an HDR is incredible, and that's why we created this HDR. That's why I showed you how to do it so that we can do a really great job of working on this image when we start talking about masking, which is coming up next.

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Ratings and Reviews

Byron Sieber
 

Jared does an excellent job at taking a subject and breaking it down step by step. He includes great explanations along the way to help you understand why he is doing something. His results, which are great photos, speak for themselves.

Michael Grosso
 

Excellent overview of the features included in the most recent upgrade of Adobe Lightroom. Very practical applications are covered at a very good pace. Thank you!

user-814d7a
 

Excellent class with great detail on the new Masking tools! Thanks, Jared!

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