Breaking Out of the HDR Rut with Lightroom 5: Photomatix Pro vs. HDR Effects Pro vs. Lightroom 5

For quite some time, I’ve felt like I’ve fallen into the HDR rut and wanted to challenge myself to break out of the box of my routine HDR workflow. I’m proud that I “busted out” today and created this photograph which was enhanced solely using Adobe Lightroom 5 with no HDR processing whatsoever. In fact, the only adjustment was using highlight recovery: