Master HDR effects
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. It gives your images a gritty enhanced detailed look.
HDR can be used for portraits, landscapes, and city scapes. Depending on your image you may
have to tweak the results.
1. The most important is first step, it is a base of
HDR Photoshop effect. Go to> Image > Adjustment
> shadow/highlight and set up values:
shadows amount: 50%
tonal width 45%
radius 41 px
High-light amount 83%
tonal width 76%
radius 1120px
2. Duplicate the original layer and change layer
blending mode to Color Dodge. This blending
gives picture strong colors and cause that light
areas turn into pure white. In next step it will be
repaired by another layer blending.
3. Do the same thing as in the second step, but layer blending is set up to Linear Burn now. You can see
big black area in picture, it has to be eliminated. Set up foreground color to black and use command
select > color range, click off invert option (we want everything except black parts), fuzziness should be
set to around 100. Now click on layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette, new layer mask will
be added and black will dissapear. There are some ugly artifacts in the picture, to remove them, click on
layer mask so it it has a white border around the thumbnail and use Gaussian blur filter. (Filter > Blur >
Gaussian Blur.) Adjust to your liking.
Foreground color set to black in
tool bar
Color Range
Gaussian Blur
Adjust opacity on this layer to lighten up darkets areas.
4. Just duplicate layer “linear Burn”, set its
blending to Overlay, select layer mask and
press ctrl+i (invert). This blending darkens
too much light shadows and raises
contrast.
Layers and its blending is very powerful
tool.
5. Now it’s time to adjust picture look, try to experiment
with layer opacity. Optimal values are about 40% for layer
“Overlay” and 55% for layer “Linear Burn”. Whole HDR
Photoshop tutorial is based on experimentation.
6. Duplicate “bottom” layer and move it up to top, then click
on icon to add layer mask. Select layer mask and soften it by
Gaussian blur filter. Set up foreground color to white and go
to select > color range with fuzziness set up around 100.
**** You don’t have to do this. but it might be interesting to try.
7. The last step colorize picture into red tones. Click on
the marked icon, select from menu gradient map and
make a gradient with warm colors. After you are done
with gradient map, invert it (select > invert). Make a
copy of layer 1 and move to the top, set blending mode
to Hard Light and adjust opacity if needed.
Save as a .jpg First name HDR