DreamInColor Offline Upload & Sell: On
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redcrown wrote:
DreaminColor,
I had not used Merge to HDR Pro on my Win7 Photoshop CC installation yet (used it many times with CS6), so I did a compare. Turns out my CC version works fine, almost the same as CS6 with one curious difference.
However, in your screen shots I noticed two things:
1. In your Merge HDR Pro screen you have the "Set White Point Preview" slider all the way to the right. That will give a very dark preview. That HDR preview and slider have always been a mystery to me. Moving that slider to the extremes certainly changes the preview, but does not affect the resulting output MUCH. Delibrate emphasis on "much" because in my previous tests it does affect the result, but only very slightly.
2. In your second ACR screen you have shadows and blacks at the max 100, but you have no adjustment in Exposure. That will definitely create a very dark image. The secret to this process is in making fairly large positive adjustments in Exposure. Note that when ACR processes a 32 bit (HDR) image, the Exposure slider range is expanded from the normal 5 stops to 10 stops. There is a reason for that.
The best process, and the one I learned from various tutorials, is to adjust Exposure first, usually in a range of +3.5 to +7.0. Then adjust highlights and shadows. I rarely adjust blacks.
But back to my CC vs. CS6 comparison. When I processed the same 6 bracket set of raw images with identical settings in both the Merge and ACR steps, the CC version came out slightly darker than the CS6 version. Both versions were quite useable, but I can't explain the slight difference....Show more →
Thanks very much for the suggestions:
1. Regarding the "Set White Balance" slider. I've tried moving that around to various settings, but I've seen no appreciable difference in the resulting 32-bit image that opens in ACR. A mystery to me too!
2. I tried the technique you described and managed to get an "ok" version of the image. However, the shadow areas are still very dark. This after I moved Exposure to where the sky should be (as I saw it that day). And again, there appears to be far less "flexibility" in adjusting the image as there was before this issue started occurring. When I used this process before in PS CC, I was able get the image very close to where I desired by lowering the Highlights to 0 and raising the Shadows to 90 (give/take). I would then make adjustments to Exposure (and sometime a few to Whites/Blacks) to fine tune the image. As you know, there's tons of flexibility with Contrast/Clarity/Vibrance/Saturation depending on how "far out" you want to go with the image.
I've tried this process with several exposure sets that I had success with in the past, and I'm unable to achieve anything even resembling those images now. So something has definitely changed here. I've kept in touch with Adobe about this issue and sent them some sample images to illustrate the problem. For now, I may re-insall CS6 to see how different the results might be.
Again, I'm very appreciative of your feedback!
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