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How to fake a HDR effect

Tuesday, 11 March 2008

In normal cases, to achieve a HDR image, you need at least 3 different exposures of the same subject to record the highlight, midtone and shadow levels. This means one have to set up his camera on a tripod to ensure the images stay constant and uses at least 3 different kind of settings to take the photos. Let say, if you only have 1 photo and you wanted very badly to make this photo looks "HDRed", you can actually do that in Photoshop.

Before Editing

Fake HDR Image

Step 1: First, open the photo in Photoshop and go to Image>Adjustment>Shadow/Highlight. Play with the settings especially the Highlights' settings. You can follow an example of mine below. Please note that these figures will vary from image to image.

Step 2: The photo will start to look abit cartoonish and slightly darker. Create a duplicate layer and use the "Screen Mode" to brighten the whole photo.

Step 3: Lastly, you just need to increase the saturation level to make it look nicer.

Conclusion: This tutorial is just meant to be a very very simple one for beginners to pick up the trick easier. There is an actual more complicated method that can have a slightly better and different HDR effect. You can refer to this article by Tutorialized.com for more in depth method. Please also take note that this is not meant to make your photos look more natural, it is going to look very very fake!

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