EDIT WILD SCENES
Christian Scheiffele demonstrates the benefits of exposure blending
1 WHY MANUALLY BLEND EXPOSURES? Most of the time our cameras can’t capture the whole dynamic range of a scene; either you have an overexposed sky or an underexposed foreground. By brightening single exposures you lose quality, which is why i prefer to take multiple exposures.
2 CORE REQUIREMENTS: CAMERA SETTINGS use a tripod – it’s important that your camera doesn’t move while taking the exposures. set up exposure bracketing with three or five shots. shoot in RAW and Manual modes, use a narrow aperture for landscape scenes, isO 100 for the best quality and turn off image stabilisation.
3 PREPARE THE RAW FILES Adjust the brightness of the dark exposure to fit to the ‘normal’ exposure. increase the shadows and exposure and decrease the highlights. increase the highlights of the normal exposure so the sky is almost white. increase the shadows a bit, then load both files into Ps.
4 ORGANISE THE LAYERS unlock one Background layer, press V for the Move tool, drag the image onto the other tab, move the mouse over the image, then press shift and release the mouse button. The images should be stacked and aligned. use the normal exposed image as your base layer.
5 START THE BLEND Add a black mask to your underexposed image and create a new empty layer with a white mask. click the white mask and go to image>Apply image> Blending mode: Multiply>OK. Alt+click the mask and press ctrl(cmd)+L. Darken the midtones and brighten the highlights.
6 WORK THE SKY Paint out the black parts in the sky manually. ctrl(cmd)+click the mask to select it and click on the black mask below. use a big and soft white brush with 100% opacity to paint over the sky, the brush circle overlapping with the foreground.
7 APPLY FINISHING TOUCHES edit both layers individually or stamp the layers by pressing ctrl(cmd) +Alt+shift+e. i like to add the camera Raw Filter to the stamped layer and perform the adjustments i normally do in Lightroom. You can now proceed with your post-processing, using standard techniques.