Using Exposure Blending to Improve Your Landscape Photography

When taking landscape photographs, it can often be difficult to capture the entire tonal range of a scene, in one photo. Exposing a photo to keep the details in a bright sunset sky while keeping the landscape exposed properly, with details still visible in the shadow areas is often impossible. This is where the process of exposure blending can come to the rescue.

Exposure blending involves the process of taking a series of under exposed and over exposed photos of a scene, in order to capture the full range of details. This can easily be done using the auto bracketing function built into most cameras to take the under and over exposed photos.

Using software such as Photoshop, the photos are aligned and layered on top of each other. Layer masks can then be used, allowing you to decide which area of each image to keep. By keeping the sky area from the ‘underexposed’ image, and the landscape area from the ‘overexposed’ image, you can get a well exposed image with details kept in both the sky and landscape.

There is also some software available that will automatically blend the exposures together for you, such as tufuse and enfuse. This gives you less control over what parts of each image are used compared to masking, but is much quicker than manually adjusting layer masks.

Unlike split neutral density filters, exposure blending can be used to manage the exposure of images where items extend across the horizon from the bottom of the image. You have precise control over which parts of the image should be bright, and which should be dark.

The main problems with exposure blending is that it can be a long and fiddly process if not using automatic software. Either way, it still requires extra processing compared to taking a single photo with a split ND filter. If you have moving items in your image, such as people, cars, or anything blowing in the wind, this can make blending the exposures difficult.

Dave Kennard writes for www.discoverdigitalphotography.com, offering photography tips and advice. The website covers all types of photography, including landscape, portrait, and macro, and is updated with new tips on a regular basis. So to improve your photography, check out www.discoverdigitalphotography.com today.