Lightroom HDR Photo Merge continues to impress

[enseth]

I'm continually impressed by LR Photomerge HDR processing. It's ability to bring out a reasonable photo without that typical HDR look is something I'm utilizing more & more and it's so damn easy. Here's and example of what I'm talking about. I wanted to do a photo of our Xmas lights for Facebook etc. I wasn't looking for exhibition quality, just something for the rellies. The risk with sort of shot is over exposure of the lights so I decided to bracket the shot and then combine. I was going to use PS but I thought I'd give LR a go just see what it could do. Below are the three bracketed shots along with the final result, which has a little additional tweaking. All in all I think it past muster so I didn't worry about PS.

DSC03586RS.jpg

DSC03588RS.jpg

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Xmas Lights-1RS.jpg

[Gazza]

Interesting end result, you've recovered a lot of detail from the shadows as well.
(Did someone ride a motor bike across your front lawn?)

[JJM]

This is interesting, I haven't tried this in lightroom yet. Thanks for sharing!!!

[ajc]

Nice result - I will have to try this in lightroom. Thanks for sharing. Cheers

[enseth]

(Did someone ride a motor bike across your front lawn?)

Only the Postman, but in this particular case I believe it's the shadow of a light pole

[Hamster]

Yes, I had a play yesterday and discovered it wasn't bad. I used to use Photomatix pro to create a 32 bit intermediate file that I brought back into LR and edited. The good thing being that the exposure slider then went to +-10 instead of the usual 5. I see that LR also gives this increased range on the slider.
The only downside I see is that Photomatix gave much more control on the ghosting, so you could choose which part of which image was selected for the final version.

[Hamster]

Actually, I just did a comparison with between Photomatix intermediate 32 bit file and LR and the Photomatix route gives better results, but they're a lot harder to get. LR doesn't do a bad job given the much less effort involved.

[fredscott]

Stunning! The original photos are so dark, and HDR did the trick.
What is EV of the three top photos?
I read the article about what is HDR photography that usually you need 3 bracketed shots at - 2 - 0 - +2 EV. Did you follow this rule?

[Grant S]

Very interesting result. I don't use LR at all so interesting to see what it can do.

[Geoff79]

I've never had/used Lightroom either and wonder if I'm missing out on something. It's an interesting result... a lot of light recovered. I wonder how something like Photomatix would handle it.

[MrQ]

Lightroom's build in HDR and panorama builders are both quite good. They don't have a lot of options though. If you're used to something like Photomatix you'll wonder where everything is in the LR version.

It's especially handy that if your original images are RAW then the merged result is too, which makes pulling more detail out the shadows and balancing the overall result much better.