Here is a representation of the five different exposures that went into creating the final image. While the darkest and lightest frames probably aren't needed, they offer a bit of a safety net when it comes to recovering highlights and drawing out shadow detail without loss of quality. If you missed out on our blog post on how to capture these images, click here
1. Select the exposures
Import your images into Lightroom, as you usually would. Identify the bracketed sequence in the Library module. Then click on the first image of your bracketed set and, holding down the Shift key, click on the last image in your bracketed set to select them all.
2. Merge settings
With the full bracket selected, right-click on any of the selected images and go to Photo Merge>HDR…. In the Photo Merge window that opens check Auto Align. You can leave Auto Settings checked, but I like to uncheck it and apply my own edits.
3. Deghosting
The Deghost Amount tells Lightroom how much ghosting it attempts to fix. I’ll either use None or Low here, as some movement is to be expected in the reflection. The Create Stack option simply stacks the images together in the Library module to keep them neat.
4. Editing controls
Once LR has finished, take your HDR image into the Develop module and adjust the settings as normal. The Exposure slider now goes from -10 to +10 rather than -5 to +5, and the Highlights/Shadows sliders work with far less loss in image quality.
