I’ve been using this tech­nique quite a bit since I watched Julianne Kost demon­strate how to cre­ate a 32-​bit TIFF with HDR Pro at Pho­to­shop World in Las Vegas.

I see a lot of peo­ple on the Inter­net com­ment­ing about “How HDR ought to be done.” This always amuses me some­what, as I never knew of a Coun­cil of Nicea con­ven­tion to reg­u­late the stan­dards of High Dynamic Range pho­tog­ra­phy. As far as I’m con­cerned, you can do it any­way you want. Peo­ple will either like your pho­tos or they won’t, and those reac­tions will vary from one per­son to another.

That said, there are plenty of folks who dis­like HDR as an effect, but like it as a method of approx­i­mat­ing the same per­cep­tion of light that the human eye can achieve. For those peo­ple, the abil­ity to cre­ate a 32-​bit TIFF with HDR Pro seems to be a great tool for cre­at­ing a “real­is­tic” HDR photo. It’s also pretty easy to do.

How to Cre­ate a 32-​Bit TIFF with HDR Pro

I’m using Pho­to­shop CS6 in these instruc­tions. You need Cam­era RAW 7.2 to make this work. Light­room users may need to update for Cam­era RAW 7.2 compatibility.

Note to Win­dows Users: When I type ?, you can sub­sti­tute the Con­trol key.

1: Load Your RAW Files into HDR Pro

If you’re a Light­room user, you can select your brack­eted pho­tos and launch HDR Pro from the menu by select­ing Photo | Edit In | Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop…

If you don’t use Light­room, don’t worry. I pri­mar­ily use Aper­ture for my photo man­age­ment and it doesn’t have this same kind of inte­gra­tion with Pho­to­shop. Instead, you just need to use Bridge. In Aper­ture, I select my brack­ets and hit ?-Shift-​S to export copies of my RAW files to a folder. Then I use Bridge to select my pho­tos and launch Pho­to­shop with Tools | Pho­to­shop | Merge to HDR Pro…

2: Set Mode to 32 Bit in HDR Pro

Once you launch Pho­to­shop with the Merge to HDR Pro com­mand, it will take a moment to load all the pho­tos in Pho­to­shop, then launch into HDR Pro. Then you’ll see a screen like the one below.

There are two things to pay atten­tion to in this screen.

1. Set the Mode to 32 bit
2. Check the box to Remove Ghosts if you have move­ment in your orig­i­nal brack­eted exposures

Pho­to­shop CS6 does a very good job of remov­ing ghosts. Of course, that’s depen­dent upon your images. If you have brack­ets with a bunch of long expo­sures and some­thing is blurry in all of the frames, then Remove Ghosts isn’t going to work magic to make those pho­tos sharp.

There’s still a lot of power behind that check­box. Once you check it, you can select the orig­i­nal expo­sure in the film­strip at the bot­tom of the screen to deter­mine which image Pho­to­shop will use to elim­i­nate ghosts, but it does a good job on its own.

Other than those two set­tings, ignore every­thing else. You can play with the slider, but it doesn’t mat­ter. Just hit the OK but­ton at the bot­tom of the screen to let HDR Pro do its thing.

3: Save As a TIFF

After HDR Pro crunches the brack­ets into one image, it will spit things back into Pho­to­shop. Resist the temp­ta­tion to do any­thing here, except save the photo as a TIFF file.

All you need to do is select a folder, give it a name, and change the For­mat to TIFF. There’s one more dia­log after you click Save. The only thing I’ve changed on this dia­log was to switch the Byte Order from IBM PC to Mac­in­tosh. If the set­tings look good to you, click OK to com­plete your Save operation.

4: Load the 32-​bit TIFF into Cam­era RAW/​Lightroom

Cam­era RAW and Light­room use the same pro­cess­ing engine, so use whichever one is best for your work­flow. As I men­tioned in the begin­ning, you need to be using ver­sion 7.2 or higher.

Bridge users can select the 32-​bit TIFF and launch it into Cam­era RAW by typ­ing ?-R.

5: Make Your Adjust­ments in Cam­era RAW/​Lightroom

Here’s where the cool stuff hap­pens. All of that dynamic range from your brack­eted pho­tos now exists in one image. When you start mov­ing the Shad­ows and High­lights slid­ers, you’ll see some fan­tas­tic results to adjust your image. Unlike doing the same thing with a sin­gle RAW file, you don’t end up gen­er­at­ing noise or arti­facts when you go to extremes with the sliders.

Here’s are some screen shots of my edits, first with the Pre­view turned off so you can see the orig­i­nal TIFF.

Now here’s the view with the Pre­view turned on to see the edits in the image.

Bonus: Develop As You Like!

You can do all of your edit­ing in Cam­era RAW/​Lightroom if you pre­fer. There are some great pre­sets avail­able to come up with some inter­est­ing results. Since I’m not bound to real­ism, I decided to add some fil­ters with Nik Soft­ware Color Efex Pro 4 using these three filters.

• Pro Con­trast
• Bleach Bypass (reduced to 20% opacity)
• Darken/​Lighten Center

Here’s my result.

I hope you enjoyed learn­ing how to cre­ate a 32-​bit TIFF with HDR Pro. It’s a fast and easy way to cre­ate a sin­gle image with a large amount of data to enhance the dynamic range in your pho­tos. Even if you never leave Cam­era RAW/​Lightroom, you can still selec­tively edit your images with the Adjust­ment Brush to bring out details or make other enhance­ments. You also avoid some of the tra­di­tional HDR effects that require cor­rec­tion later, such as halos, elec­tric col­ors and dirty clouds.

HDR Pro wasn’t one of my favorite tools for cre­at­ing images in the past, but this tech­nique is becom­ing one of my favorite methods.