My father was an avid photographer as long ago as the 1960s. He had a state-of-the-art Leica camera and processed his own photos in a darkroom. He preferred his photos in slide format.

I think sometimes of how he would be amazed at what we can do now days, both behind the lens as well as in the relatively new domain we call post-processing.

This photo of my cat Tasha in peaceful sleep in the bay window is a good example of post-processing. It is a composite image using HDR merging in Adobe Lightroom. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and it allows you to merge shadows and highlights that would otherwise be too underexposed and too overexposed. Even though some DSLRs come with a feature that allows you to merge from within the camera itself, you can also do it in post-processing in order to be able to further tweak the image; something you can’t do as well if you do HDR strictly from within the camera.

Click the photo and observe the detail better. Notice how the shadows and the highlights aren’t really all that far apart? Not anymore, at least. And doing an HDR merge in Lightroom is really easy. Some tips for doing HDR that I don’t hear often would include:

1 – Use a tripod. You’ll want the compositions of the underexposed and overexposed photos to be as nearly the same as possible.

2 – Do any further post-processing after the HDR merge.

Some good introductions to HRD can be found at ShotKit and ExpertPhotography.