My Workflow For Natural-Looking HDR Photos | Ugo Cei

High Dynamic Range imaging (HDR) has a bit of a bad rap, as it’s been widely abused to create surreal, overprocessed, highly saturated images that do not resemble reality at all. This bad rap is undeserved, though, as HDR can be used to effectively capture a larger dynamic range that would be possible without using it. I don’t refrain from using HDR, when I think the situation requires it, but I strive to achieve results that still look natural, while at the same time avoiding burned-out highlights and grainy or blocked shadows. A natural scene, in my opinion, is one that presents highlights and shadows and, using those, manages to focus the viewer’s attention onto the main subject. Overdoing HDR leads often to a scene that has a lot of local contrast, but no clearly defined areas of light and darkness and thus ends up looking very flat and unnatural. To get natural-looking results, I’ve developed a workflow that doesn’t use any tone-mapping plugins, but is based instead on the support of 32-bit TIFF files that is included in the latest versions of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. Here is how I proceed……

Source: blog.ucphoto.me