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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BackdoorArts" data-source="post: 443559" data-attributes="member: 9240">So like a lot of folks I pulled down LR CC yesterday and watched the Scott Kelby & RC Conception webcast yesterday.  I knew about the HDR and Panorama merge functions, but I was pretty stoked when I found out that it saved the files as 32-bit DNG "RAW" files.  For the pano's this is awesome and delivers as described.  For HDR?  Hmmmm.When I saw RC demonstrate it the final result was beautifully toned and looked very close to what you'd want in a realistic HDR image (as presenters he obviously was able to shoot and choose images that had the "Wow" factor).  He went on to speak about how you could now adjust the white balance, contrast of the RAW file, but not much more than that.  So, when I actually got a chance to play with it I was a little surprised to see what it actually produces compared to what I saw in the webcast.What do you get?  A more than decent rendering of a 32-bit "RAW" file with as much light information as you can pull from the source files (my three +/-3EV D750 files yielded a 95MB file).  That's awesome that it gives you that kind of file.  But if you choose the Auto Tone option, which is what they showed you as the completed image in the webcast, what you get is a DNG file that actually looks an awful lot like the 0EV exposure (what you see when you turn "Auto Tone" off), with the Develop module sliders preset in a way you would normally expect to see them in an "HDR Toning" preset in prior versions of LR.  So, it makes for a nice image, but as the sliders are set it gives you little room to play with the image afterward.A problem?  Not really, but definitely an over-sell.  What I would have loved to have seen was the "Auto Toned" image get saved in a way that allowed you to still play with it in Lightroom without having to export it as a TIFF/PSD file that can be imported and then tweaked, which is what you're essentially doing when you use in the Photoshop HDR process, Nik and/or any other HDR package.  My take, if you're using a modern camera with great dynamic range then there isn't much you'll get from this that you wouldn't get from applying the same settings (Highlights at -100, Shadows at +70, Whites at +15, Blacks at -15) to just the 0EV image.  I suspect that for this to really be worthwhile you're going to need to go at least +/-5EV to see something significantly beneficial.I'm going to play with it some more with an eye towards stretching the +/-EV boundaries to see at what point it really produces something beneficial, but in the meantime, if you found this a little hard to follow, here's 10 minutes explaining it...[MEDIA=youtube]hhX5CUUtldE[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

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