How to create Faux HDR effect in Photoshop

May 19th, 2016
Photoshop

This Photoshop tutorial is a short screencast on how to use Photoshop to produce an
HDR effect in just less than a few short steps. It’s a simple tutorial with the end result an effect that can be applied to your designs time and time again.

Don’t fancy watching the screencast you can download the Photoshop action from here.

Tutorial Details

Program: Photoshop
Time estimation: Under 3mins
Difficulty: Beginner

Preview

Video transcript:

Hello and welcome to Creative Nerds. Today we have a quick tip to share with you on how you can use Photoshop to create an HDR photo effect, so let’s jump straight into it.

We’re going head over to “Image,” “Adjustments,” “Shadows and Highlights,” and we’re then going to increase the amount to be 50% for the shadows and the highlights to also be 50%, and then select the “Okay” button. We’re then gonna right-click on our current layer and select “Duplicate Layer”, select “Okay”. Head back over to “Image and Adjustments” and this time we’re going to select “Saturate”. And then we’re gonna change the blend mode on that layer to be overlay, and we’re then gonna duplicate the original layer and we’re gonna drag it on top of that previous layer we created. And we’re then gonna head over to “Filter,” “Over,” and select “High Pass,” and we then want the High Pass radius to be 66, and we’re then gonna change the blend mode to be “Soft Light”. And there you go. Just created this awesome, faux HDR photo effect, which you can apply to your designs.

It’s a great little quick tip and takes less than a few seconds to apply this effect to your designs. I hope it’s a tutorial you can use in your projects.