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Using Lightroom & Photoshop for Great HDR Images

Lesson 8 from: Lightroom and Photoshop for Architectural Photography

Randy Van Duinen

Using Lightroom & Photoshop for Great HDR Images

Lesson 8 from: Lightroom and Photoshop for Architectural Photography

Randy Van Duinen

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Lesson Info

8. Using Lightroom & Photoshop for Great HDR Images

Next Lesson: Content-Aware Scale

Lesson Info

Using Lightroom & Photoshop for Great HDR Images

It's a nice little church, and what we're going, again do is use some JPGs just to make this go a little bit quicker because there's a lot of 'em. And what I wanna do is select the normal image and I wanna select the darker image. One of the brighter images then all the rest of the darker images. I don't think I want, oops there we go. All right, so here's our images. We're just gonna go to photo, edit in, Photoshop, merge to HDR Pro. Now, I like using HDR Pro for a lot of reasons. Whenever I'm doing either landscape photography or architectural photography, this gives me a very normal looking image. It doesn't get noise in it, it doesn't get over saturated. It's just very clean and works really, really well. So when it opens it up in Photoshop, you're gonna get normally the view that you will see is this right here. This view in Photoshop, if you tried to use this, your image would look horrible. So don't ever use it. Just don't. I don't know what they're thinking when they came up wi...

th it, but don't use it. What you wanna do here is go ahead and click instead of 16 you wanna go to 32 bit. If you have moving things, if you have trees or people or something like that walking through, you wanna remove ghosts just by clicking that right there. It will pick the center one. We don't have that problem, there's nothing in there so we're just gonna say okay. Oh wait, before I go there, you see right here we have complete toning and Adobe Camera Raw. If you didn't want to do this in Lightroom, if you just wanted to use Camera Raw, you'd click that button right there. It would take your image into Adobe Camera Raw and you can do all the adjustments I'm gonna do in Lightroom. I just use Lightroom all the time, it's the way I prefer to do it. But if you wanted to, you could do it this way and then open it up in Photoshop as a smart object. But we're gonna do it in Lightroom and I wanna show you how. We're just gonna say okay. And the next thing is really easy, just come up to file, save as, and we're gonna put it down here. Let's give it a name. And it's in our folder. This is the most important part though, change it from Photoshop to TIF. And just say save. When the TIF option window comes up, you wanna make sure 32 bit float is opened, I mean is checked. And image compression to none. That's very important or else this will not work. So 32 bit float, say okay, and then just close out of Photoshop. You don't need it anymore. And now we can come down here and find our image. Because it did import it, I think. Oh wait, we put it in TIFs, there we go. There's our image. So now, let's go ahead and tone map this in Lightroom. So we're gonna go to the development module, come up here and come to basic. So let's just start working on this, again, I'm gonna go to texture and bump that up, bump clarity up. De-haze I'm not gonna touch. Vibrance, I'm gonna add some vibrance into this. Now I'm gonna come up here, my color temperature's good. There's nothing wrong with that. But contrast, we'll see. Let's go ahead and set our black point first, and that's pretty good, not too much on this. And our white point. Let's bring our white point all the way down. And now we're gonna hold the option key again and go in highlights and see if we can bring that down. So now, I don't have anything blowing out. If I want to, I might even, looking at the image, I have texture there but maybe I want a little bit more. So I might bring my highlights down just a little bit more, like so. So I know I got something in the image there. I then want to go ahead and open up exposure a bit, and shadows. And you can kind of see how that starts to open everything up. Now that's looking pretty good and again, this is not looking over HDR, which you get a lot of times. Over saturated, it's looking natural. I wanna come up here and just check a couple things. Maybe I can brush some of this in here. Remember, this is 32 bits so we have more information than we can use so we can go ahead and add a brush. And double click on effects, so that it zeroes everything out. And let's just take highlights down and see if that will help us just darken this area just a little bit. Ah, pretty good. Little bit smaller brush, do the same thing. And, a little bit there. I think that's looking pretty good, I might add just a little bit of contrast to it since we kind of darkened it down but that's looking pretty good. Now I do have a couple problems that I think I can fix here a little bit with my brushes. I have some blue light coming in here on the balconies. Instead of, Instead of going into Photoshop, I'm gonna go ahead and create a new layer in Lightroom and go ahead, double click on effects to zero everything out and bring up the temperature to warm. And get myself a bigger brush, and just kind of come here on some of these areas that looking a little blue, and paint it in. Paint in some more warmth to kind of overtake some of that blue that was coming through. Now, again, this is way too much so once I think I have it where I want, I can come over here and take it down so that I just don't have as much. Again, come here, just kind of take a, see where your hotspots are. Let's go over to the other side. There's some there. Go on here and just kind of take out some of that blue that's coming in from outside to make it look a little bit more natural. Probably a little bit there. And you can see as I have this thing blown up, there is no noise in there. There's no artifacting. It's in really good shape and that's why I like doing a lot of my HDR images using Lightroom into Photoshop and then back to Lightroom to tone map it. It's a great way to do it. There's other programs that are great too. There's Aurora, there's Photomedics, a whole bunch of other ones. I think this works really good for this type of look and this type of work.

Ratings and Reviews

JennMercille
 

You really can do anything a thousand different ways in Photoshop! Randy broke down his processes with easy to understand instruction, and made it easy to see how and why you would choose different methods to create impressive architectural images in various situations. Great class!

Student Work

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