HDR Editing in 2023 Using Lightroom and Photoshop

Adobe just finished up their annual MAX conference where they demonstrate the latest things their software can do to help content creators. This usually includes major updates to all of the products in their Creative Cloud suite, including Lightroom and Photoshop that photographers tend to care the most about.

One of the features included in the latest release of Lightroom and Photoshop is support for HDR editing. I have to be honest here, I have not yet done any of the HDR editing that is new here in 2023. We’ll get into why I haven’t used it in a minute, but this is why I had to bring Greg Benz on the show. Not only does Greg have experience with this new HDR editing, he has a plugin that can help photographers bridge the gap while not every display can show these new HDR images.

How is HDR editing different from HDR processing that has been available for years?

A lot of you may be thinking that HDR processing has been around for years, how is this new? A perfectly valid question. The old HDR processing we have all been used to using (and seeing – usually overdone so that it looks terrible) is one where we take 3 or more images at different exposures and combine them together into a single image. The idea was to overcome the limitations of our cameras to capture the full dynamic range of the scene and combine them together.

The new HDR editing feature in Photoshop and Lightroom is quite a bit different. It is about leveraging the full dynamic range of the amazing camera sensors we have had for many years with a monitor that can actually show us everything that is there.

The monitors we have been using for a while now, we will call them standard dynamic range (SDR), are capable of showing us 8 stops of lights. The difference between the darkest dark can only be 8 stops of light different from the brightest bright. Digital cameras vary in the dynamic range captured but most have been capturing at least 14 stops of light in a single image for many years.

With SDR monitors, if the scene had more dynamic range than the 8 stops of light, we had to sort of slide those 8 stops around until we got the image where it looked best. Sliding that exposure around with a single image hasn’t been very easy, which led to the HDR processing that so many photographers had gone to when trying to cram the 14 stops of light into something we could see on our monitors showing 8 stops.

HDR monitors change that. It has to truly be an HDR monitor (see below), but they are capable of showing all the stops of light your camera is capturing in a single frame. The update Adobe just released to Lightroom and Photoshop enables editing in HDR, using the full capabilities of an HDR monitor.

What are the advantages to the HDR editing capabilities?

The advantage is that photographers can finally see the full dynamic range captured by the sensor in your digital camera. A sunrise or sunset can now have both color and brightness. Christmas lights will actually glow. Greg tells me that it is a transformative experience that you have to see to believe.

I love the way that Greg explained this with the example of a blue sky. With an SDR monitor as it tries to show a bright sky it will max out the brightness of the blue pixel and need to turn on the red and green pixels a little too so that it can be bright. Doing that means the blue gets duller, most likely looking white.

We have dealt with this by using the highlights slider and lowering them until we see some color come back to the sky. With an HDR screen the blue pixel can get bright enough to show the bright sky without having to turn on the green and red p...