I have tried a few HDR tools in the past decade or so and prior to Lightroom 6 Photo Merge HDR the others did not yield satisfactory results that looked realistic. Hand blending was the only option if realistic looking images are what you are after. With the Lightroom 6 Photo Photo Merge HDR feature everything changes. The images that used to take me quite sometime to process using layers now takes me hardly 5 minutes and even before the image is brought into Photoshop everything looks perfect as if it were from a single capture. This new feature is going to be immensely helpful in saving time. Below you can see the lightroom interface, how the images look straight out of lightroom and after being processed in Photoshop. My processing in PS is quite simple.
| Step 1: | Nik Color Efex Pro "Brilliance and Warmth" to add a little warmth selectively and increase the saturation |
| Step 2: | Nik Color Efex Pro "Pro Contrast" to selectively increase contrast while protecting highlights and shadows |
| Step 3. | Resize and Save for web. |
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A few images processed using Lightroom 6 Photo Merge HDR
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