For those who are not very much into photography, it’s probably that the term HDR seems unknown and for others is nothing but another photo trend. HDR (High Dynamic Range) is a series of techniques that allow to generate better luminance between the darker and lighter parts of a picture. The best way to achieve HDR results is through computer rendering or merging several pictures, this last one is known as low dynamic range. With the advent of Photoshop CS5, making HDR has become accessible to every person that owns the Adobe Suite.

For start, let’s choose a picture that has clearly some exposure problems but besides that it’s a really nice picture that deserves to be fixed, we picked this picture from the Venetian Hotel at Las Vegas.

Then we go to Image>Adjustments>HDR Toning and the panel will popup.

You have a lot of functions to adjust your image until you get a great result, we played for a while until we came out with the following image.

This is of course a large topic that can be taken for making a large article showing all the techniques and applications of HDR but for now, you have learned how to experiment with HDR on Photoshop CS5 without relying on expensive programs and still achieving great results.