I expect there are still going to be images that will need extra work in Photoshop, just as I had to do with Photomatix. It had more noise than Lightroom’s noise reduction could handle and it looked awful. Some of my initial results had a lot of noise from using the deghosting feature. That’s not to say that Lightroom CC HDR Merge is perfect. Instead of going through the 32-bit TIFF process, I’ll save myself some time and patience using the new HDR Merge feature in Lightroom CC.Īll I want from HDR at this point is dynamic range, not a grungy, painterly or fantasy post processing look to my images. I’ve already gone on record for losing interest in tone mapping. The difference seemed more about the results than the time it took to achieve them.įor my efforts, Lightroom CC HDR looks like a reasonable tool to use. My own efforts didn’t really see either as noticeably faster or slower than the other. It depends upon the number of images you have the tool process, the options you’ve selected for processing, and also the time you take tweaking settings to get to the final result. Some will look at the merge process and declare a winner and loser, but I don’t think that’s really a fair comparison. We have tools that allow for differences in creative expression, even if those differences may seem subtle to the casual viewer. The Lightroom CC final results look more realistic to me and the Photomatix results have more of the painterly look we’ve come to expect from HDR. When I look back at the Lightroom CC HDR results, I don’t see black clouds. Typically, I had to go into Photoshop with some of the original exposures loaded as layers to mask in areas that Photomatix damaged. Just a mild amount of contrast in Photomatix really blackened those clouds. My own best practice is to let Lightroom do as little as possible except merge the brackets together. The deghosting features ought to be called “Just add noise.” It’s fine if you leave it off, but you can get wretched amounts of noise if you let Lightroom try to eliminate ghosts. You can have Lightroom try to autotune your photo, but I don’t care for its results. When it begins, there aren’t many options. For this example, I used only two exposures: the -2 and +2 exposure values. Lightroom CC HDR doesn’t need to use all of the images in your brackets. Let’s take a look at both tools and their results The Lightroom CC HDR Process My Magic Arm gizmo confused them, but security agreed that it wasn’t a tripod and therefore wasn’t prohibited, so I got to use it. The guy in front of me had a pocket tripod and he wasn’t allowed to take it up. The security folks are pretty rude to anyone with a tripod. Instead, I used a Manfrotto Magic Arm and Superclamp. You can’t take a tripod up there, which is a shame, since it’s incredibly windy. I went to the top of the Stratosphere Tower in Las Vegas to take a bracket of sunset images. Truth be told, the same is true of Photomatix. The initial result from Lightroom CC HDR is rather unimpressive. It doesn’t give you a painterly effect, nor does it generate deeply saturated colors in the result. If you look at HDR as a processing style, then you’re going to be sorely disappointed in Lightroom CC HDR. It does it for you in once convenient process. The nice part about it is that you don’t have to leave Lightroom to process that dynamic range in another tool and then return the result. It gives a straight-forward rendition of your image with range between shadows and highlights. If you’re simply looking just for high dynamic range, then there’s a good chance you’ll like what Lightroom CC has to offer. The answer to that question is really going to determine whether you like Lightroom CC HDR or not. Is this new tool for creating HDR going to change the game for everyone? What Do You Want From HDR? Comparisons to Photomatix are inevitable. The Lightroom CC HDR feature is getting a lot of attention lately.
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