Smith-Rock-Sunset

In this video tutorial I share a technique for quickly and easily creating natural looking 32 bit extended dynamic range images using Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop. To be able to perform this technique you will need Lightroom version 4.1 or newer and Photoshop CS6 or newer. (Correction: In the video I state that ACR in CS5 will support 32-bit tiff files. It turns out that ACR version 7 is required to edit 32-bit files and that is only supported in CS6.)

It is common in outdoor photography to be confronted with scenes that have a degree of contrast that is too extreme for the camera to accurately capture in a single exposure. Raw files from the latest DSLR cameras contain more dynamic range than ever before, making it possible to recover an amazing amount of highlight and shadow detail from a single exposure, but there are still dynamic range limitations and pushing a single exposure too far can create problems with noise, particularly in the dark areas.

Most often I use advanced layer masking techniques in Photoshop to manually blend exposures for the greatest degree of control, quality and creative flexibility, but such techniques take a lot of practice to perfect. You might be interested to know that Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw offer a quick and easy to learn way to combine exposures to create extended dynamic range images without the look and quality issues that you can run into with HDR tone mapping software. For a full explanation check out the video.

Update: It is also worth noting that if you own Photomatix by HDRsoft, it can be used instead of Adobe HDRPro to generate 32-bit blended tif files. These will also give you 20 stops of dynamic range to work with in LR or Camera Raw. Some people have shared with me that they think Photomatix does an even better job than HDRPro.  If you have LR 4.1 and an up to date version of Photomatix you are also good to go.

For my complete selection of Photoshop video tutorials including my workflow, other methods for extending dynamic rante and luminosity mask techniques visit www.OutdoorExposurePhoto.com.

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