Lightroom Mobile now captures HDR images in RAW

Taking an HDR photo used to be something that required ample knowledge of photography and a long process. Now smartphones are taking dynamic range to a whole new level on-the-go. Still, I must say I have yet to see photos that really achieve what an actual DSLR camera and the manual HDR process can output. Lightroom Mobile claims to be doing the real deal with the latest update (or at least as real as it can get on a smartphone).

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has been updated to version 2.3. This upgrade comes with a few improvements, but the biggest one is “authentic HDR” capture mode. This feature will allow users to take RAW DNG photos in HDR.

The process is said to be as real as doing it in a computer and with an actual camera, making for much higher quality photos in a file that has immense amounts of light information for your editing needs. The app’s camera will measure lighting and decide where to measure light to obtain a proper exposure for each part of the frame. Then it will shoot, align, merge, deghost and tonemap the images for you. This will result in a full 16-bit RAW file.

Now, there is one downside. A pretty big one, at that. This feature is currently only supported by a few Android handsets. Adobe claims this is due to the high demand of processing power and resources that true HDR in RAW requires. Supported devices currently only include the Samsung Galaxy S7, S7 Edge, Google Pixel and Pixel XL.

Other improvements include the usual bug fixes and the addition of local adjustments with linear and radial gradients. This means you can change certain settings (exposure, brightness, etc.) to specific areas of a photo.

We can’t yet say how good these RAW HDR results will be, but the fact that this is true RAW HDR without all the hard work seems promising. It’s worth a look, so let’s hit the comments section to discuss just how good the results have been for each of us.