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How often have you thought ‘it’s not a bad image but, somehow it just doesn’t quite do the scene justice’. When extreme of shadows and highlights are present, today’s cameras just can’t capture the range that the eye can. To get a better result it used to be necessary to be a Photoshop guru, but since the arrival of Lightroom there are more intuitive ways to rescue an image. With Lr2 it just keeps getting better at that kind of task, with the Targeted Adjustment Tools being perhaps the stars of the show.

However, there are times when a different approach seems to achieve a better result, for me at least. I’ve no golden rule about which type of shot this applies to, but often landscapes with leaden skies, or shots of the interior of old castles or cathedrals are likely to be candidates. Of course you can probably guess where I’m heading with this - yes HDR, well almost but not quite.

With HDR the recommended approach seems to be to use auto bracketing to take a series of shots (3, 5, 7 or even 9) with a +/- EV, in RAW format, normally using a tripod. Even if you have a tripod to hand, the camera you have with you might have limited bracketing abilities. There can be strong views about these requirements and while bracketed jpeg’s seem to be just about acceptable, any other deviation is labeled ‘pseudo HDR’ or some other derogatory term.

I’m always hoping to capture the scene that I remember - I’ve no wish to create the extreme, surreal, other worldly HDR images that we’ve all seen posted online. With that objective in mind I’ve found that using HDR software, (in particular Photomatix) on a single image can help to enhance an otherwise flat image. Rather than put a label on the process, I just see it as another recipe using imaging software to achieve a particular result.

The routine I use involves creating two virtual copies of the chosen image in Lightroom, and then applying an EV adjustment of say 1.5 (plus on one copy, minus on the other). The three files are then selected and exported via plug-in to Photomatix for processing. Once processed the resulting HDR image is Tone Mapped. Fine tune to your own taste - but hopefully the resulting image will reveal more depth and be more appealing than the original. Of course it’s all a matter of personal taste but hopefully the before and after images shown here help illustrate that.

The vendors of Photomatix (www.hdrsoft.com) have recently issued a new beta version of their Lightroom plug-in and it seems to be a great improvement on the earlier version. But, I still have a small beef about it. When you save the processed image in Photomatix, you are brought back to Lightroom with the enhanced image as a new import. Still, it would be nice it you were returned to the location you started from, (perhaps within a collection), as happens with other Lr plug-ins. Gripe over.

In outlining this process I may just be proving that my Lightroom skills are not what they might be, since a close approximation of the result could perhaps have been achieved without the round trip journey. I've tried side-by-side comparisons with other processes and blending methods, but I like the results achieved from the process described. I’m simply trying to recreate the scene I remember, and sometimes the algorithms within Photomatix seem to help deliver that. Just think of all the images you took years ago, which have the potential to be ‘refreshed’.

I should mention that in some cases the processing may result in noise issues, which can of course be dealt with either in Lightroom or another application.

There are a number of other applications out there which might help achieve similar results, but that’s maybe a topic for another time. Meantime if you have your own ‘recipes for realism’ I hope you’ll post them below. One day we’ll laugh about all the software manipulation that’s necessary to get there today

Les Haig