Fixing Exposure and Removing Artifacts with High Dynamic Range

Step Three: Generate the HDR image

• Click Compose to generate the HDR image.
  
  

Step Four: Fine-tune tonal characteristics and apply other edits

The Optimization tab shows the HDR composition alongside tonal correction tools like Coarse contrast, Histogram clipping, View HDR image, Details adjustment, as well as an option to save the HDR image.

• You can adjust the Coarse contrast setting from -100 to 100. For this tutorial, a value of 78 was applied. The coarse contrast value determines the overall contrast setting.
  
  
• Adjust tonal output by dragging the triangle handles under the Histogram clipping. Drag shadow to -36, midtone to 32, and highlight to 13.
  
  Histogram clipping provides a graph of the tonal information of the composition. The pink areas at both ends of the histogram show cropped color information. These areas represent colors that cannot be shown on screen.
  
  
• Details, on the other hand, allows you to make highlight, midtone, or shadow adjustments to bring out finer details in the light, midtone, or dark areas in the image.
  
  For this tutorial, the values used were -72 for Highlight, -88 for Midtone, and 78 for Shadow.
  
  
• Click the HDR Operations tab to access more editing tools for rotating, resizing, and cropping your composition.
• Click then draw a selection in the Preview window. Adjust the selection to take out the adjacent roof peeping at the left side.
  
  
  
• A dialog box opens asking if you want to continue, click OK.
  
  
• Click OK to close the High Dynamic Range dialog box. A new document opens to show your composition.
  
  

  Using the same optimized image, you can create outputs in different moods by adjusting the settings. The output for this tutorial is a crisp image with deep color contrasts.