Blend your exposures

COMBINE EXPOSURES IN PHOTOSHOP FOR TOP IMAGE QUALITY AND BETTER SKIES

It’s often the case with landscape photography that if we expose for the foreground then the sky will be overexposed. The difference between sky and land can be more extreme in waterfall scenes, as waterfalls are often surrounded by dense woodland or shaded by rocky cliffs, which cuts out ambient light. This makes it a challenge to balance out the two in a single frame. The solution is to take a series of bracketed frames (using a tripod), then combine the sky and land in Photoshop. You could employ HDR for this, but often we get better results with manual exposure blending. To do this copy, paste and mask in the same way as the blending technique described previously, thereby blending the better sky with the lighter foreground in the layer below.