Adobe Photoshop CS5 One-on-One

3. Adjust the sliders. You can see back in Figure 9-37 that HDR
   Pro’s initial preview reveals a successful fusing, bringing out
   details in the wood and reining in some of the highlights,
   like those along the pipe on the ground. But the real fun of
   Merge to HDR Pro comes from using the new sliders, which
   allow you creative control over the output. The fact is we’re
   working with a through-the-looking-glass 32-bit image and
   seeing a preview of what our 16-bit output will look like.
   So things can be unpredictable, not entirely intuitive, and
   subject to healthy trial-and-error. In our case, here are the
   settings (shown in Figure 9-38) I chose:
   
   
   • The Edge Glow controls help you create the effect of
     bounced light that has become synonymous with HDR.
     Set the Radius, which controls the size of the glow, to
     200. Set the Strength, which controls the interpretation
     of what exactly is an edge by comparing pixel contrast,
     to 3.00.
   
   
   • The next few sliders can be thought of as analogous
     to those in the Levels command. The Gamma slider
     controls midtone contrast. If you move it to the right,
     midtones are increased. If you move it to the left, where
     somewhat unintuitively the value gets bigger, the shad-
     ows and highlights are emphasized. In this case, move
     the Gamma slider to the right to .50.
   
   
   • The Exposure slider represents just that, the theoreti-
     cal f-stop of the compiled image. For this image, reduce
     it to –1.00.
   
   
   • The Detail slider will have a sharpening effect. For this
     image, I like taking it way up to 150. To me, playing in
     HDR makes no sense if you don’t create some impact.
   
   
   • The Shadow and Highlight sliders control those areas of
     greatest darkness and greatest lightness, respectively. In
     this case, leave the Shadow set to 0, but move the High-
     light slider all the way to the left, to –100, to get as much
     detail as possible from around the spectral highlights
     (which aren’t recoverable themselves).
   
   
   • The Vibrance and Saturation sliders work like the ones
     we saw in Camera Raw. I increased the Vibrance to 70
     and the Saturation to 25 to bring out the warm glow of
     Figure 9-38. the sun against the wood.
   
   
   
   

330 Lesson 9: Pro Photography Tools