It seems like HDR photos created in Photoshop are all the rage these days. But creating those HDR images takes some effort.
What if you could create similar effects in less than 10 seconds, working with a single photo?
Good news… you can! Flickr member ‘Tbatty’ shared his method of achieving these effects with other Flickr members.
Here are the settings to use as a base:
Recovery: 100
Fill Light: 100
Blacks: 30
Contrast: 30
Clarity: 60
Saturation: -20
Sharpening Amount: 50
Some pictures will turn out great with these settings, and some you may need to tweak a little, but it’s a good base to start with.
I created a User Preset in the Develop module set to these values so that applying this effect is a single click away.
Here are a few photos that I converted using this method. Each photo only required a single RAW file. I included a photo of the Pentagon memorial that I posted in my last blog entry for reference.
Let me know what you think.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Tom // Sep 22, 2007 at 1:27 am
Works quite good but introduces a lot of noise in the dark areas. How do you deal with that? Thanks for posting!
2 Mike Zupan // Sep 22, 2007 at 10:34 am
Thanks for visiting the site Tom.
I run into the noise problem too. I think it’s just the nature of the beast since you are making extreme changes to a single image, as opposed to working with multiple images at taken at different exposures to get the full range of true HDR. Sometimes you just need to tone back the sliders a bit to get acceptable results.
Or if the noise produces a grainy effect that is even across the entire picture, then you can impress your friends by telling them that it was an artistic decision to intentionally make it that way!
3 Gabby // Sep 29, 2007 at 6:15 am
Thank you! I haven’t been able to get HDR to work in CS2 - this was a breeze!
4 Patty Adams // Oct 8, 2007 at 12:29 am
I have been hunting for days and reading every tutorial on hdr and dragan effect and it takes ages this gives a fantastic result in seconds. I then just tidy it up in photoshop! Thank you so much!
5 links for 2008-02-18 « Yet another blog // Feb 18, 2008 at 5:18 am
[...] Using Lightroom to simulate HDR effects (tags: lightroom hdr) [...]
6 al // Mar 8, 2008 at 9:11 pm
this is fantastic mate, takes seconds
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