Hi! In this video, I'm going to show you how to do HDR photography in Adobe Lightroom.
Hi! I’m Adam and welcome to First Man Photography, the channel that will help you take your photography
to the next level. Before we get into the video, in this tutorial, I'm going to be using
Adobe Lightroom. Now this is a programme that’s very powerful for storing, organising and
editing your photos. If you haven’t got that yet, I’ll put a link down below for
you so you can get a free trial. After that, it’s £8.50 a month in the UK and $10 a
month in the US. with that, you also get Adobe Photoshop. That’s a really great value package
and a really powerful photo editing suite. Okay, let's get into this.
HDR stands for high dynamic range. All that means is that within that image you going
to be capturing those real nice highlights but also bringing out the detail in the shallows
and everything in between. When we see things in the real world, the combination of our
eyes and our brain pulling all that information any way, so we have a really nice view of
the world with really high dynamic range between those highlights and those shadows. Now sadly,
the processes in our cameras are not quite as powerful as that so we aren't able to pull
all the detail out. That’s why you high contrast images where detail is lost in the
shadows or you get blown out highlights or vice versa. It’s impossible to expose for
the image as a whole in certain circumstances. There is a way round this though and that’s
with HDR. If you’ve seen HDR before, you may be thinking that you don’t quite like
it because, when it first came about, some of the images that it created were very unrealistic
and it looked little bit like you’d thrown up all over the image. Thankfully though,
this is no longer the case and we can really use HDR to our benefit to pull out details
in some of those really high contrast situations that you may find yourself in. Now all we
need to do to achieve this is take two or three images of your scene and then combine
them in Lightroom. What that does is, you capture the highlights in one picture, the
mid-tones in another and then the shadows in another and exposing each of those in the
correct way. Then Lightroom will combine them and produce the final image. I’m going to
go through the settings in the camera quickly and then we’ll get into Lightroom and I’ll
show you what to do.The first thing you need to do is to get out somewhere beautiful so
you’ve got something great to shoot it will end up being great image at the end. Next
we need to employ bracketing option that our camera offers. This will only work in manual
mode. So the first thing we need to do is expose for somewhere around the mid-tones.
If you need to work in auto or aperture priority you can do that but make a note of the settings
then transfer them into manual mode. Switch in to manual mode and then you need to hit
the Q button or go into the exposure compensation chart which now becomes the bracketing. Slide
the roller and you can set the bracketing so you have those three shots either side
of that exposure that you gained. Sometimes, it works well with one stop two stops of bracketing,
it really depends on the lighting in situations you’ve used. I’ll, generally, be working
somewhere between one stop and two stops. Once you’ve done that, shoot your shot but
you really want to have the camera as stable as possible. So it’s best done on a tripod.
Although, if you are very steady, it can be done hand held.
So I’m assuming now, you’ve got your shot and will head into Lightroom.
Okay, so straight into Adobe Lightroom and this is a really straightforward edit, simple
to do and really quite effective. This is the image I’m going to be working with.
It’s a shot I took on my recent trip to the Yorkshire Dales when I captured my first
vlog. If you haven't seen that yet, I really recommend you see it. I’m really proud of
it. Go in to this description down below and I’ll put a link for you there. Three images
we’ve got. This one here exposing for the shadows, the mid-tones and the highlights.
You can see that bright sky there and the rest of it is underexposed. I’m trying to
just pull the details out of that sky on that shot. So just select all three, select the
first one, hold shift down and select the last one and then right click and you’re
going to go straight to Photo Merge. Then just simply click HDR and this window should
pop up and start creating a preview of your HDR. A few options over on the right here.
Auto Align, you could leave that because you want everything to line up. Auto Tone, you
can choose whether you have that. I usually leave it in because it does make some tonal
changes that you can undo afterwards if you want but sometimes it goes get it right so
I just leave it. Deghost, now what that is is, if you’ve handheld HDR, there might
be some slight movement between each of the frames and Lightroom will try and correct
that. If there’s something moving in the frame that you don't want there, Lightroom
will also try and correct that. The amount of that Lightroom does that can be controlled
here with the low, medium and high. I, generally, have my HDR’s on a tripod so I usually go
for None and that doesn't do any de-ghosting whatsoever. You’re generally going to get
the highest quality using the setting of None. Just go ahead and click Merge. Lightroom takes
a second to do it’s think and then create that last image for you of the completed HDR.
Then you can just go in to that, view it and you can see I’ve got detail right across
the highlights here where you can now see some blue sky. I’ve got some mid-tones and
the shadows are there as well. There’s not a lot of contrast in it so you want to hit
the D go into Develop module and start making some changes. This is a DNG file so you still
have all that raw data there the really make those nice, accurate changes with the sliders
here. As you can see, it’s put highlights right down there with those tone changes that
it did automatically. I’m just going to adjust that a little bit. You can see the
difference it’s making. Probably has it right keeping it quite down low, reducing
the shadows and then just give it a nice contrast boost to start bringing out that detail in
the images. Add a little bit of saturation vibrance. It's up to you how you do your settings
but, as you can see, it’s a really simple edit and you can start to see what a nice
image this is becoming. It’s nice and simple, easy to do using the power of Adobe Lightroom.
I think you'll agree that the image doesn't look unrealistic, it's nice and it represents
what I saw at the time. So it’s not cheating, it’s not tricking anybody, it's just a way
of presenting the scene that you saw to your viewer.
Okay, I hope you enjoyed that and now you’ve got a good idea of how you’re going to use
HDR to your benefit. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to the YouTube
channel. I know it’s going to help you out and get your photography to the next level.
There’s videos going up on a Sunday and a Wednesday. I’ll see you on another video
very soon. I’m Adam. This is First Man Photography......
Out!!!