This results in a much better looking photograph that can mimic what you saw when you took the photograph initially. Now you can process the DNG file in Lightroom just like a regular photograph, but you have a lot more information in the shadows and highlights to play with. This is a raw file that contains all the dynamic range and information from the 3 photos (Note: It doesn’t have to be 3 images, it could be 2, 5, 7 or more. Initially the image will show more detail than the original 3 images (if auto tone is on). Click Merge and the images will be merged into a new 16-bit floating point DNG file.Īs you can see here the file will be called originalFileName-HDR.dngĥ.
#HDR IN LIGHTROOM CC WINDOWS#
I shot a second image at -2EV to capture all the details in the highlights outside the windows and a 3rd capture at +2 to get all the textures on the inside of the bus.Ģ. The regular photo doesn’t have enough dynamic range to show all the highlight details outside the windows and the shadow details inside the bus at the same time. Here I have captured 3 images of a bus interior. Lightroom has the ability to merge photographs together and tone map them all without ever leaving Lightroom.ġ. All that has changed today! You can now process HDR images entirely in Lightroom. In recent years, you have been able to process HDR images in Lightroom and ACR as long as they are merged in Photoshop and saved as a 32-bit Tiff file.
#HDR IN LIGHTROOM CC FREE#
If you are new to HDR an want to understand HDR, check out this free HDR and Photoshop tutorial. The final step is to “tone map”, which is where you either go realistic or the hyper-realistic path. To achieve this effect, multiple images are photographed and then merged together in Photoshop. Its been around for a while and used heavily by photographers to bring out cloud details in the sky, details in the inside of buildings and through the windows at the same time, and also used for surrealistic photographs that work well with textures and reflections. Its a way to get more shadow and highlight details in your photographs that comes closer to what the human eye sees.
#HDR IN LIGHTROOM CC HOW TO#
In a final twist, both the HDR and Panorama tools produce DNG files rather than JPEGs or TIFFs – and this gives much more scope for image manipulation and enhancement later.Lightroom tutorial: How to do HDR In Lightroom Just two overlapping frames can be stitched together to produce a more normally-proportioned super-wideangle shot. Panoramas don't always have to be in a super-wide letterbox format, of course. It works extremely well, and its a simplified version of the panorama tools in Photoshop, which makes it all the more welcome. Lightroom will produce a perfectly-stitched panorama with no further effort on your part. The stitching process will leave ragged blank areas at the edges of the picture, and while Photoshop has special 'content-aware' technology to fill these in, Lightroom does not, so the Auto Crop option will save you having to crop the edges off manually afterwards.Īnd that's it. Now you just decide whether you want Lightroom to 'Auto Crop' your panorama or not. A cylindrical projection is usually best for regular single-strip panoramas. You can leave it to 'Auto Select Projection' or manually choose 'Spherical', 'Cylindrical' or 'Perspective'. Lightroom offers three different 'Projections' – you can think of these as the surface you're creating the panorama on. If you've done this before in Photoshop you'll know that you're then presented with a fairly complex dialog listing different layout options and a list of source files. First, you select the individual frames of your panorama in Lightroom, then choose 'Photo Merge' and then the 'Panorama' option from the menu. The Panorama Merge feature could hardly be simpler. Instead of creating a lurid, 'artistic' HDR image with dramatic tonal contrast and 'glow' effects, it produces a very realistic image with all the shadows and highlights intact but without unrealistic tonal compression or flattened contrast. When you hit the Merge button it can take a minute or so to blend the images, and once it's done it's clear that Lightroom has done something different and rather good. There are options too for 'Deghosting' the image, but these may only be necessary if you have moving objects moving between the frames, such as leaves and branches, or passers by.