Single Image HDR with Lightroom 4

After we worked on this image as a HDR file we wanted to see how far we could get just using the single middle Exposure.

Imported

Shadows look very dark and the highlights are clipped. The histogram confirms our findings.

Basic Corrections

 
• Highlights to -100 and Shadows to +96
• Whites to -27
• Blacks to +15
• Clarity to +51

This helped to bring the image to life.

Curves

We want to open up the shadows some more and here the Curves work fine.

More Whites Tuning

We want the windows less bright and Whites set to -58 does the job.

 
More Blacks Tuning

We still would like the shadows more open. Setting Blacks to +38 helped.

Final Result

Conclusion

In cases where the dynamic range of the scene is not extreme like in this example we can even work with only one exposure. Lightroom 4 with its new tone-mapping controls makes it easier than previous versions.
The camera needs to support very clean shadows and allow enough highlight recovery. The Nikon D3x images worked fine in this regard.

This is a section from our e-books (here the Develop book):