And if you’re not an HDR enthusiast then what do you gain by reading “No HDR”. By posting “No HDR” what do you accomplish? If you’re an HDR enthusiast, then you don’t care if it’s HDR or not. While you’re pondering, think about this too. Does it really matter whether you really did the official 3-shot-bracket-Photomatix thing or not (again, I really like his photos and post-processing, so this isn’t a critique). Using the Shadow and Highlights sliders and pumping up the Clarity in Lightroom in your photo makes it “look” like HDR. Forget what program you use to create it.

I guess my thought is that HDR is simply an effect these days. In the end, does it really matter what the official definition is, if photographers have pretty much redefined it in their minds? Some may stop at the beginning where it reads that HDR is just there to bring out greater dynamic range in the shadows and highlights – and some may use the whole paragraph to define HDR. But honestly, you can read what you want into the definition. It goes on to talk about how HDR “can” also include multiple photos and certain HDR specific processing programs. The actual definition on Wikipedia is: “HDR is a set of methods used in imaging and photography, to allow a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image…”. The end result is a photo with lots of detail in the shadows and highlights, and almost a surreal look to it.Īs many of you know, HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. Lightroom 4 is incredibly good at faking HDR nowadays right? Heck, I’ve even got presets that do it for you. Do we still need 3 or 5 or 7 bracketed photos that were processed in a program like Photomatix, to classify an image as an official HDR photo? Or is HDR simply the effect of bringing out more detail in the shadows and highlights (and maybe a little gritty/surreal look to it). My point (and question to you) is whether HDR (that’s not really HDR), is still HDR? Hasn’t HDR simply just become and effect? Kinda like Black & White or the cross-processing effect.

But that’s not really the point of this post. Now, honestly, I don’t really know the meaning behind his disclaimer, so I won’t pretend to guess too much about it. And in the comments on 500px post, the photographer himself wrote “processing in Lightroom and Viveza 2”. So RC Concepcion and I did a little digging in the metadata of his photo and saw lots of adjustment brush work done with Clarity (Basically the HDR effect slider in Lightroom). But the photo (to me at least) looks like an HDR photo. The photographer, Jose Barbosa (who’s work I think is fabulous by the way), wrote “No HDR” next to his photo. I saw this post the other day on 500px (link: ) and it got me wondering. So I figured I’d write about it here since, well, the post-processing involved in what you’re about to read was done in Lightroom. I posted a smaller version of this to my Google+ page yesterday but the comments got me thinking more about the topic.

Simply hdr logo