Warning, the following is not an HDR photograph — it just kind of looks like it.

HDR = High Dynamic Range. It is an image that was taken using multiple exposures then essentially layered to include all the information from all the exposures. It is an image that has tonal information in the darkest shadows and the highest highlights. It also looks like butt on most monitors and all printers, so what we do is we take the HDR image and use software to map pixel values from this wide range of values to ones that can actually be represented on a monitor on on paper. The result is the interesting “painterly” look that HDR photographs are known for. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, there are a few in my portfolio, but the best representations can come right from a Flickr “HDR” search

I’ve done HDR, I don’t really like it, and that’s not what I did here. Why am I talking about it then? Because the tutorial that I used for the following photos claims that it is an HDR-like effect and I’m tired of hearing about photos that are HDR, but really aren’t. I also don’t appreciate that they at all associated this with the “Dave Hill Look” because I don’t want my images to turn out exactly like photographer Dave Hill nor do I really think this effect replicates his work in any way.

Boccacino - Before this new effect

Boccacino - After this new effect

The tutorial is on abduzeedo and is titled Super Cool Photo Treatment in Lightroom. It claims, “In this tutorial you will learn how to create a sharpness effect on your photo using lightroom, it’s almost like an fake hdr effect and at the same time the result is very close to what Dave Hill gets on his photos.” I almost puked, but for some reason I gave the tutorial a try. First two, three, five photographs it didn’t really work on, but then I started to understand how it could be used. The bottom photo is an already “developed” photo of mine that I put through an already-personalized version of this tutorial.

What it *does* do, is increase the existing brightness values in the middle to darker ranges, retains (and knocks down) highlights, increases contrast between the middle to dark values, increases contrast in the middle section separately, but again leaves the highlights alone. The final touch in the tutorial is to increase the saturation of colors in a natural way (keeps most skin tones looking normal), then desaturates the colors globally a touch, which kind of gives a push-pull feel to the colors of the image.

Cop Drama - Before

Cop Drama - After