| Rick McEvoy Photography

This tip is especially good if you are producing lots of HDR images. It is just as good if you are producing one as well to be honest.

You just need to have a few things set as you would like them in Lightroom, which takes no time at all.

Anyway this is good stuff – I hope you all find this tip in Lightroom useful.

To merge images in Lightroom to produce an HDR image you would normally do the following.

Select your images.

Before I go on – an important point – I only ever use two images from a bracketed set of three, the image that was over exposed by two stops and the image that was under exposed by two stops. Try doing this yourself, firstly with the two images, then do the whole thing again with those two images and the correctly expose first image – both HDR files are identical!).

Sorry where was I.

Select two images. Right click, select Photo Merge, then HDR. Or select the two images and use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl H.

This brings up a dialogue box and generates a preview. This is the bit you can cut out. There are various options in the preview dialogue box, and I never change them. I just leave the following boxes checked;

Auto Align

Auto Tone

I also leave the Deghost Amount at High.

Next select Merge, and the process continues in the background.

This is the tip.

Press the shift key. That is the extra thing you need to do.

Select the images to create the HDR image.

Select Shift, control, H.

And Lightroom creates an HDR image in the background while you carry on working. And once you have done one you can do another, and another etc etc. There comes a point where you have to leave Lightroom to it but I can run a batch of these and go and make a cuppa (which I was going to do anyway) and there they all are when I come back.

Or you can do something else while Lightroom does its stuff.

Not bad eh?

And a word on file names, and the issue of finding the actual HDR files themselves, which becomes more of an issue if you have produced a load of them.

The HDR image should take the file name of the first image, and have the file extension -HDR.dng. So when I put together images names IMG_6612.CR2 and IMG_6613.CR2 the new file created, which sits between the two in Lightroom (rather oddly) is called IMG_6613-HDR.dng.

If you are not sure where the HDR image (or indeed images) has (have) gone to all you need to do is go to View, Sort then select Added Order, and the new HDR image(s) should appear as the first (or last) image(s). It(they) being the first image(s) to be added.

Did that make sense?

Wonderful how these things work….

Nice.