Hello everyone!
Today I'm going to show you how to use the HDR Batch plug-in for Lightroom, which is really helpful for real estate photography.
You can use the plug-in to merge multiple sets of bracketed exposures in Lightroom.
And that means you can automatically create HDR images while you do something else.
Your bracketed sets don't all need to have the same number of photos in them.
For example, you might shoot sets with more bracketed exposures for interiors, ...
... and less for exteriors.
In cases like this, organise your sets into stacks so the batch can tell which set each photo belongs to.
Lightroom can automatically do this for you.
Right click in the grid view and choose ... 'Stacking', ... 'Auto-stack by Capture Time...'
Adjust the time between the stacks if necessary, ...
... then click 'Stack'.
And you're done.
Now the stacks are prepared for the plug-in.
So I'm going to select all the stacks,...
...right-click on the selection, then choose, ...
... Export, ... HDR Batch.
The plug-in has two options to organize bracketed photos.
One for stacks ...
... and another one for a fixed number of photos in each bracketed set.
I'll stay with the first one since my bracketed exposures are grouped into stacks,
but if they weren't stacked I could still have batched them using the second option.
In the rest of the plug-in's window you can select various options for HDR processing.
The HDR preset you choose determines the look of the merged HDR images.
Since I'm batching a property shoot, I'm going to filter the presets to show just the best ones for real estate.
The interesting thing is, you can get an idea of how a given preset looks by clicking on this button.
Here the presets are listed as thumbnails.
The preview in the middle shows the effect of the preset you choose.
You can also create your own preset by adjusting some of the HDR setting sliders.
For instance, I'm going to save these settings as a preset, and name it 'Bright Interior'.
This preset will now be applied to all the photos I've selected.
Now I'll start the batch going.
The nice thing is,
the batch runs in the background so you can do other work in Lightroom if you wish.
When you come back from a photoshoot with a lot of HDR photos, this plug-in can be a big time-saver.
But try it for yourself.
The trial is free and doesn't expire, it just adds a Photomatix watermark to the batched results.
If you have any questions please leave them in the comments section.