Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) is a technique for estimating the surface local angular reflectance and characterizing the visual properties by varying lighting directions and capturing a set of stereo-photometric images. The proposed method, namely HD-RTI, is based on the coupling of RTI and HDR imaging techniques. The HD-RTI automatically optimizes the necessary exposure times for each angle of illumination by using the response of the scene. Our method is applied to industrial surfaces with micro-scratches from which we will estimate saliency information. Results show that coupling HDR and RTI enhance the characterization and therefore the discrimination on the surfaces visual saliency maps. It leads to an increase in robustness for visual quality assessment tasks.