November 24, 2012
Sunrise in Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument, Utah, and using Lightroom for HDR

I made this image on my last morning in Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument about two weeks ago. The sky was clear, so to do something interesting after the dawn light, I turned around and faced the sun to capture the sunburst as it crested the horizon. I used f16 to help create the sunburst effect, and set up the 1D X to do a 7-shot bracket in 1.5-stop increments with the high speed motor drive. Because the latter, longer exposures were a significant part of a second, I couldn't capture all frames at 12 frames per second, but it sure is convenient to capture them all in one swoop within about two seconds because you just have to hold down the cable release, plus items in the scene don't have much chance to move far in that short time.

I processed the image that day by manually combining the exposures in Photoshop and I wasn't happy with the result. I reprocessed it yesterday using a new technique I learned from Jan to create an HDR image using a 32-bit file in Lightroom v4.1 or later. Here's how to do it.

1. Set up Lightroom to do external editing in Photoshop using TIFF files:  Preferences… > External Editing (tab)
2. Import the bracketed photo series RAW files into Lightroom
3. Select the bracketed photo series RAW files then select  Photo > Edit In > Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop…
4. Wait for the images to load into Photoshop CS6
5. Click the "Remove Ghosts" box, set the Mode to "32 Bit", then click "OK"
6. Wait for Photoshop to create the 32-bit file
7. Select  File > Save and the file will automatically be put into the Lightroom catalog
8. In Lightroom, select the 32-bit file then go to the Develop module
9. Use the Exposure, Highlights, and Shadows sliders to develop the file w/o worrying about the typical HDR tone mapping controls
10. Be amazed by the natural-looking results!
11. Export the image to Photoshop by selecting  Photo > Edit In > Edit in Photoshop CS6…

Well, step 10 usually happens. I processed another recent sunburst image and it created odd color banding in the sky.

To show you how much better the Lightroom HDR method is on this image, the following shows the hand-blended image on the left and the Lightroom HDR image on the right. Ignore the difference in white point, and look at the sunburst. The hand-blended image is a bit muddy right around the sun and the top rays are less distinct compared to the Lightroom HDR image. If you don't regularly use Lightroom and only want to do the HDR part in it, here's how.

1. Set up Lightroom to do external editing in Photoshop using TIFF files:  Preferences… > External Editing (tab)
2. In Bridge, select the bracketed photo series RAW files, or already-processed TIFF files, then select  Tools > Photoshop > Merge to HDR Pro…
3. Wait for the images to load into Photoshop CS6
4. Click the "Remove Ghosts" box, set the Mode to "32 Bit", then click "OK"
5. Wait for Photoshop to create the 32-bit file
6. Select  File > Save As… and save a 32-bit TIFF file
7. Import the 32-bit file into Lightroom
8. Select the 32-bit file then go to the Develop module
9. Use the Exposure, Highlights, and Shadows sliders to develop the file w/o worrying about the typical HDR tone mapping controls
10. Be amazed by the natural-looking results!
11. Export the image to Photoshop by selecting  Photo > Edit In > Edit in Photoshop CS6…

I prefer this method because the 32-bit TIFF file can be placed where I usually put images for processing which isn't where I keep my RAW files which is where it ends up using the Lightroom-centered approach presented first.