HDR in Camera Raw Rocks!

Lightroom received a lot of hype and hoopla over the awaited merge to HDR in Lightroom without going into Photoshop, which is a great feature.  However, Lightroom is not the only Adobe product that received a makeover a few weeks ago.  As many know Adobe Camera Raw (Photoshop’s Raw editor) is identical to Lightroom’s Develop Module.  Typically if anything changes in Lightroom it changes in Adobe Camera Raw as well.

After the hype of Lightroom receiving HDR capabilities I received a plethora of emails wondering if I was finally going to make the jump to Lightroom.  Before I considered it, I checked out the new Adobe Camera Raw 9 in Photoshop CC 2014 just to make sure the capabilities were the same and sure enough, they are!  I think I can hold out on using Lightroom for at least a few more years 🙂

ACR Panel

A few key Points here:

  • This is not the same as Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop.  Merge to HDR Pro yields a 32 bit HDR image.
  • Adobe Camera Raw produces a 16 Bit .DNG (Digital Negative File) to hold all of the HDR Data.
  • I have not seen any significant difference in the 16 bit and 32 bit processing.  As a matter of fact I ran this image in the tutorial through both the 16 bit and 32 bit process and saw no severe differences.
  • Remember to utilize all of ACR’s capabilities when editing an HDR image.  For example, Chromatic Aberration reduction, Noise Reduction, The Adjustment Brush, etc.

Check out this tutorials on how to merge to hdr in Adobe Camera Raw


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Blake Rudis
f.64 Academy and f.64 Elite are the brainchildren of Blake Rudis. While he is a landscape photographer, he is most passionate about post-processing images in Photoshop and mentoring others.

For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
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