TOP TIPS BLEND YOUR EXPOSURES
Combine exposures in Photoshop for optimum 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 more 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 afterwards in Photoshop. You could employ HDR techniques for this, but often we get better results with manual exposure blending. To do this we copy, paste and mask in much the same way as the shutter blending technique described opposite, thereby blending the better sky with the lighter foreground in the layer below.