Camera Raw Combo

HDR in Camera Raw

There's a couple things we can do while working in Camera Raw that will help our workflow when we get to working on these images in Photoshop. One thing we can do has to do with HDR, which stands for High Dynamic Range. The standard way of doing this is while shooting an image you bracket your shots so that your get your under exposed and over exposed of the photo, as well as your normal shot. We can do something similar to this in Camera Raw simply by saving the version that we like the most, and then saving two other versions so that we can combine them later in photoshop. Lets show you how in the following steps.

Save First Image

Now working with this image we have, we like the way we have it overall, so we click Save Image and we'll save it as something like "normal". Adjust your image as you see fit and get it to an overall quality that you like and do the same and save the image.

Make Adjustments for Tree

Next thing we wanted to do in this image was bring up the exposure for the tree. So we upped the Exposure a bit and also brought up the Fill Light slider to bring out some clarity and brightness in that tree. While doing this, we don't pay attention to the result this has on the rest of the image. We're only concerned with the tree.

Save Second Image

Next we click Save Image again and this time save it as something different. In this case we saved it as "cabintree". Then clicked Save.

Make Adjustments for Sky

Finally we wanted to get a good exposure for the sky, so we bumped down the Exposure slider, bumped up the Recovery slider and lowered the Brightness slider. This enhanced our sky in this image and brought some more detail into the sky. You may notice that it really darkened the rest of the image, but we're only concerned with what it has done with the sky.

Save Third Image

Again save this image again as something different. In this case we've adjusted the image in camera raw in order to enhance our sky, so we've saved the image as "sky".

Now what you can do in Photoshop is put these three images on top of eachother and get the best of all three into one image. You'll need to know Layer Masks in order to be able to do this, but it can be highly useful in enhancing your image and getting the best quality. Again this method is similar to bracketing with the camera, but instead you're essentially "bracketing" with Camera Raw by saving the image three different ways and bring out the best of all of them by combinging them in Photoshop.