Perhaps better don my hardhat here... 

I  resisted using HDR for a long while because of the effect you present above.  However I did see some examples which appears more 'normal' so I dabbled in Ps but didn't persevere, too much messing about...  Then Lightroom provided the facility, at your prompting with difficult lighting I used bracketing (If in doubt, bracket.), for sunrises and heavy shadow/bright sunlight, high  contrast situations and started using Lightroom's HDR to combine the NEFs.  This is something I now do routinely in these difficult situations, the Flint Castle image being a recent example, bright sky and heavy shadow on the castle walls due to the light source being beyond the castle.  Of course there are situations where bracketing is difficult or impossible.

I have been copying some of my fathers Kodachrome slides, which as you will appreciate often lack shadow detail.  I ran sets of 5 bracketed exposures with varying EV's then selected the best and ran the NEFs with best exposures for shadow, mid range and brights through Lr's HDR process.  A little trick which allows batch processing of many sets, control+H keys add the set to a sue for HDR processing, I have fed Lr with as many as ten sets of images at one time, left the computer for a while and come back to find they are all done to perfection!  Except for the ability to extract otherwise invisible shadow and highlight detail they look entirely normal.  So Yes, I do use HDR but only as a tool to extract the maximum exposure range from a given subject, not the create an HDR 'effect', which I tend to dislike.



Another image with massive EV range, extreme shadows and direct sun...



I bracket wherever I feel the EV range is being pushed, as an insurance if you like, in processing I may not use all or any of the bracketed NEFs, I am becoming more relaxed since the D800 because I feel so much more can be recovered or revealed with the D800 files.  If you look at the histograms of these types of HDR images usually the Adobe software seems to adjust the mid tones and spread them very evenly and eliminate any highlight or shadow clipping.

Unlike JK, I rejoice at the Adobe policy of paying monthly for my photo software, because otherwise I would not have access to such outstanding software at such a low price (less than the price a packet of cigarets a month?  I don't and never have smoked...) but that's a discussion we have had many times before.

Last edited on Fri Mar 8th, 2019 10:08 by Eric