If you’re won­der­ing why any­one wants to make their HDR pho­tos really suck, stick with me. There’s a method to my madness.

One of the pho­tog­ra­phy blogs I read — A Photo Edi­tor — has a post that con­tains some seri­ous wis­dom. Stated nicely, pho­tog­ra­phers should show their bad pho­tos. We all have them. Lots of them. We just should’t show them. I’m going to break that rule for a cou­ple of reasons:

1. I’ve already shown these ugly photos.
2. I hope you can learn some­thing from my mistakes.

Why HDR Pho­tos Suck

All HDR pho­tos are remark­able. Some are remark­ably good and the rest are remark­ably bad. I strive for the for­mer, but I’ve landed in the lat­ter descrip­tion more than once. As painful as it is to show these pho­tos again, I can hon­estly say that I ben­e­fited from the expe­ri­ence. If I hadn’t tried and failed, I wouldn’t learn what to do on the next HDR photo, and the next, and the next, etc.

I took this photo at Down­town Dis­ney when I was just begin­ning. Some of you may remem­ber my other bad expe­ri­ence there with Dis­ney Secu­rity, but that’s not really the topic for this post. That’s when I cap­tured one of the world’s uglier HDR Pho­tos. Here it is.

Your eye quickly tells you this HDR photo sucks, but let’s enu­mer­ate some of the rea­sons so your mind can under­stand just why it sucks.

1. Halos — You never see such a glow around the tops of trees or build­ings like you see in so many HDR photos
2. Black Clouds — It may be a dark and stormy sky, but that dingy sky is just unnatural
3. Elec­tric Col­ors — I love green leaves on trees, but I don’t expect them to shock me like these bright colors

If we want to throw in a bonus prob­lem, it’s all the ghost­ing from peo­ple mov­ing around in the fore­ground. Some­times we can fix that later in post pro­cess­ing, but it’s much smarter to avoid the prob­lem when you’re tak­ing your photos.

Deal­ing with HDR Prob­lems in Photoshop

One of the eas­i­est ways to deal with HDR prob­lems is to use Pho­to­shop Lay­ers. No mat­ter which HDR tool I use, I always end up tak­ing the result­ing image, along with the orig­i­nal pho­tos that cre­ated it, and load­ing them in in Pho­to­shop via Bridge — like the screen­shot below.

You don’t have to load every orig­i­nal photo, just the ones that you think you may use to mask into the HDR photo. I tend to load them all out of habit, but may only use a cou­ple to fix prob­lems. Once all of the files are loaded in Pho­to­shop as Lay­ers, then you can start blend­ing them together.

• Drag your HDR photo to the top layer.
• Add a layer mask.
• Look at the top (HDR) layer and decide what’s wrong with it.
• Turn off the top layer by click­ing the Layer Vis­i­bil­ity icon (looks like an eye).
• Exam­ine the file in the next layer. Decide if parts of it would look bet­ter in the HDR image.
• If noth­ing in that layer works (too dark, too bright, etc), delete it.
• When you find a layer with a sec­tion that looks bet­ter than the top (HDR) layer, then turn on the top layer’s visibility.
• Change your brush color to Black and select the Layer Mask
• Paint over the area of the image that you want to replace from the layer beneath it.
• When you’ve blended every­thing from the next layer that you need, Merge Down
• Repeat the process until you’re satisfied.
• Delete any remain­ing lay­ers that you don’t need to use in the Layer Mask

To fix the halo in the sky, I use a large, soft-​edged brush to grad­u­ally blend the dif­fer­ence between the trees and the sky. As for those dark, dingy clouds — just replace the whole sky from one of the lay­ers that you think works best. There’s no law that says your HDR photo has to be 100% tonemapped.

In many cases, layer mask­ing will also elim­i­nate the elec­tric col­ors like those bright green leaves in the photo above. If that doesn’t work, then the Hue/​Saturation Adjust­ment is your friend. Here’s what I do:

• Grab the Lasso tool and make a loose selec­tion around the color you want to adjust.
• Add a Hue/​Saturation Adjust­ment Layer. You’ll see that your selec­tion is auto­mat­i­cally part of the layer mask.
• Change the color from Mas­ter to the color that is clos­est to the area you want to adjust — in this case, Green.
• Start by reduc­ing the Light­ness to bring the bright­ness out of the color until the sec­tion you selected looks right to your taste.
• Now switch to your Brush tool and paint over other area of the color you’re adjusting.
• If you’re sat­is­fied, stop here. If not, slightly lower the Sat­u­ra­tion to elim­i­nate any hot spots that remain.
• Repeat for other col­ors that need to come down a notch or two.

From the image above, you can look at the layer mask to see my selec­tion was a loose cir­cle in the trees on the left side of the photo. After I pulled the Light­ness almost all the way down, the tree leaves in the selec­tion looked a bit more nat­ural. After that, I grabbed my Brush and painted over the other bright green spots in the photo.

After doing some layer mask­ing and adjust­ing col­ors, we end up with some­thing like this photo.

What did we get for our post-​processing?

• The Halo is gone
• The sky no longer works in a Ghost­busters movie
• The leaves aren’t elec­tric enough to power a small city
• Even some of the peo­ple in front of the build­ing aren’t as “ghosted” as in the first photo.

Did all of this turn a bad photo into a good one? No, of course not. It’s still an unin­ter­est­ing photo with too much activ­ity and no real sub­ject to define it. HDR won’t make up for a poor composition.

Remem­ber, I took this photo to prac­tice HDR. Although I’ve never been happy with the result (after all, it’s just not an inter­est­ing photo), I’ve been amazed by how much it has to teach. While I can’t do any­thing to really save this photo, it’s helped me when work­ing on other images to avoid the mis­takes I made here.