Lightroom HDR Photo Merge continues to impress

[enseth]

I'm continually impressed by LR Photomerge HDR processing. It's ability to bring out a reasonable photo without that typical HDR look is something I'm utilizing more & more and it's so damn easy. Here's and example of what I'm talking about. I wanted to do a photo of our Xmas lights for Facebook etc. I wasn't looking for exhibition quality, just something for the rellies. The risk with sort of shot is over exposure of the lights so I decided to bracket the shot and then combine. I was going to use PS but I thought I'd give LR a go just see what it could do. Below are the three bracketed shots along with the final result, which has a little additional tweaking. All in all I think it past muster so I didn't worry about PS.

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[Gazza]

Interesting end result, you've recovered a lot of detail from the shadows as well.
(Did someone ride a motor bike across your front lawn?)

[JJM]

This is interesting, I haven't tried this in lightroom yet. Thanks for sharing!!!

[ajc]

Nice result - I will have to try this in lightroom. Thanks for sharing. Cheers

[enseth]

(Did someone ride a motor bike across your front lawn?)
Only the Postman, but in this particular case I believe it's the shadow of a light pole :)

[Hamster]

Yes, I had a play yesterday and discovered it wasn't bad. I used to use Photomatix pro to create a 32 bit intermediate file that I brought back into LR and edited. The good thing being that the exposure slider then went to +-10 instead of the usual 5. I see that LR also gives this increased range on the slider.
The only downside I see is that Photomatix gave much more control on the ghosting, so you could choose which part of which image was selected for the final version.

[Hamster]

Actually, I just did a comparison with between Photomatix intermediate 32 bit file and LR and the Photomatix route gives better results, but they're a lot harder to get. LR doesn't do a bad job given the much less effort involved.

[fredscott]

Stunning! The original photos are so dark, and HDR did the trick.
What is EV of the three top photos?
I read the article about what is HDR photography (https://aurorahdr.com/what-is-hdr-photography) that usually you need 3 bracketed shots at - 2 - 0 - +2 EV. Did you follow this rule?

[Grant S]

Very interesting result. I don't use LR at all so interesting to see what it can do.

[Geoff79]

I've never had/used Lightroom either and wonder if I'm missing out on something. It's an interesting result... a lot of light recovered. I wonder how something like Photomatix would handle it.

[MrQ]

Lightroom's build in HDR and panorama builders are both quite good. They don't have a lot of options though. If you're used to something like Photomatix you'll wonder where everything is in the LR version. :)

It's especially handy that if your original images are RAW then the merged result is too, which makes pulling more detail out the shadows and balancing the overall result much better.