Good morning everyone! What a beautiful day! 🙂

Yesterday I was playing a bit with the new HDR Pro in Photoshop CS5 and thought I could share it with you.

Here’s what I did. I shot five frames of a landscape in the Peak District (beautiful place, by the way).

I bracketed the exposure to get most out of the image (highlights in the sky and shadows in the foreground).

It would be very hard to get it all right in one shot as you can see below. This would be a “normaly” exposed image:

This is the original image, without any adjustments.

Then, I opened Merge to HDR Pro dialog box by going to File -> Automate -> Merge to HDR Pro:

When the dialog box opens, click on Browse to select the images to merge and press Ok:

Now the Merge to HDR Pro dialog opens, it may take quite a while if you use high resolution images (it took about a minute when I used raw images). This brings you a big window with a number of sliders. Look at the screenshot to see the settings I used as they worked fine in my case.

Here are the settings I used (it’s hard to see it on the screenshot):

• Radius – 500px (maximum)
• Strength – 4 (maximum)
• Gamma – 0.39
• Exposure – 0.20
• Detail – 110%
• Shadow – 0%
• Highlight – -100%
• Colour: Vibrance 63%, Saturation 57%.

And here is the final result:

I hope you enjoyed it. 🙂