Lightroom CC (2015) – exciting stuff!
New direct HDR MERGE for bracketed exposure sequences inside the Develop Module of Lightroom CC 2015 – nice one Adobe! I can see Eric Chan’s finger-prints all over this one…!
Twilight at Porth Y Post, Anglesey.
After a less than exciting 90 minutes on the phone with Adobe this vary morning – that’s about 10 minutes of actual conversation and an eternity of crappy ‘Muzak’ – I’ve managed to switch from my expensive old single app PsCC subscription to the Photography Plan – yay!
They wouldn’t let me upgrade my old stand-alone Lr4/Lr5 to Lr6 ‘on the cheap’ so now they’ve given me two apps for half the price I was paying for 1 – mental people, but I’ll not be arguing!
I was really eager to try out the new internal ‘Merge’ script/command for HDR sequences – and boy am I impressed.
I picked a twilight seascape scene I shot last year:
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I’ve taken a 6 shot exposure bracketed sequence of RAW files above, into the Develop Module of Lightroom CC and done 3 simple adjustments to all 6 under Auto Synch:
- Change camera profile from Adobe Standard to Camera Neutral.
- ‘Tick’ Remove Chromatic Aberration in the Lens Corrections panel.
- Change the colour temperature from ‘as shot’ to a whopping 13,400K – this neutralises the huge ‘twilight’ blue cast.
You have to remember that NOT ALL adjustments you can make in the Develop Module will carry over in this process, but these 3 will.
Click to view LARGER IMAGE.
Ever since Lr4 came out we have had the ability to take a bracketed sequence in Lightroom and send them to Photoshop to produce what’s called a ’32 bit floating point TIFF’ file – HDR without any of the stupid ‘grunge effects’ so commonly associated with the more normal styles of HDR workflow.
The resulting TIFF file would then be brought back into Lightroom where some very fancy processing limits were given to us – namely the exposure latitude above all else.
‘Normal’ range images, be they RAW or TIFF etc, have a potential 10 stops of exposure adjustment, +5 to -5 stops, both in the Basics Panel, and with Linear and Radial graduated filters.
But 32 bit float TIFFs had a massive 20 stops of adjustment, +10 to -10 stops – making for some very fancy and highly flexible processing.
Now the, what’s a ‘better’ file type than pixel-based TIFF? A RAW file……
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So, after selecting the six RAW images, right-clicking and selecting ‘Photomerge>HDR’…
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…and selecting ‘NONE’ from the ‘de-ghost’ options, I was amazed to find the resulting ‘merged file’ was a DNG – not a TIFF – yet it still carries the 20 stop exposure adjustment latitude.
Click to view LARGER IMAGE.
This is the best news for ages, and grunge-free, ‘real-looking’ HDR workflow time has just been axed by at least 50%. I can’t really say any more about it really, except that, IMHO of course, this is the best thing to happen for Adobe RAW workflow since the advent of PV2012 itself – BRILLIANT!
Note: Because all the shots in this sequence featured ‘blurred water’, applying any de-ghosting would be detrimental to the image, causing some some weird artefacts where water met static rocks etc.
But if you have image sequences that have moving objects in them you can select from 3 de-ghost pre-sets to try and combat the artefacts caused by them, and you can check the de-ghost overlay tick-box to pre-visualise the de-ghosting areas in the final image.
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Switch up to Lightroom CC 2015 – it’s worth it for this facility alone.
Click to view LARGER IMAGE.
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