Although HDR photography has become popular in recent years, it has never lived up to its original promise of allowing photographers to capture images as their eyes originally saw them. Instead, most HDR images are gritty, high-contrast versions of the original. Stylistically, it was put to good use by some photographers looking for a post-apocalyptic, Blade Runner-esque effect. However, for a larger majority of photographers, HDR remains a disappointment because HDR imaging tools were too crude to create photorealistic HDR images that look like a single capture while containing the dynamic range of the original scene.

With updates to leading HDR tools like Photomatix and new entries like HDR Photo Pro along with the new HDR Pro addition in Photoshop CS5, it appears HDR may finally be living up to its original promise. Using these new tools, photographers can retain subtle balances in contrast found in the original scene; subtleties that were obliterated by earlier versions of HDR processing tools.

Photoshop CS5, specifically, provides two new options for tone mapping (the process of converting a high dynamic range image into a standard, printable dynamic range)—HDR Pro and HDR Toning. Both are markedly better than the previous HDR tools found in Photoshop.

HDR Pro
The HDR Pro feature accessed from Bridge’s Tools menu (Tools>Photoshop>Merge To HDR Pro), from within Photoshop through Mini Bridge’s Tools Menu (Tools>Merge To HDR Pro) or through Photoshop’s File>Automate>Merge To HDR Pro command.

All three paths lead you to the new, and vastly improved, HDR Pro dialog. The options within the dialog will be familiar to anyone who’s suffered through Photoshop’s HDR toning in the past. Only now, the process is more intuitive and the results are far superior to their predecessors.

In my experiences, I’ve had great success with moderate dynamic range images (typically 3 -5 images in 1-stop increments.) I haven’t had as much luck with very high dynamic range images, like landscapes with shade and sunrise, for example. Time will tell if the new tools in HDR Pro will yield better results. Still, this update is a big step in the right direction.

HDR Toning
A variation on the updated HDR Pro tools is the HDR Toning command found within Photoshop’s Adjustments menu (Image>Adjustments>HDR Toning). This feature allows you to quickly balance a high-contrast image without the need for masks or selections. As such, I expect HDR Toning to become a valuable tool in the photographer’s arsenal.

The biggest drawback to the HDR Toning is that you are currently unable to perform the HDR toning adjustments on a Smart Object. As a result you are performing fairly radical contrast corrections on a rendered image as opposed to an unrendered raw file. As a result, it may limit its usefulness for the most demanding photographers as significant adjustments may increase image noise or create posterization. In my tests, HDR Toning was unable to recover clipped highlight detail present in the original raw file.

It will be interesting to see how photographers adapt to using these new HDR tools. Will there be a new, creative “look” derived from HDR compositions, or will we get better at working around the remaining limitations to create true, photorealistic HDR? I look forward to finding out.