"Central Valley Noir"

Thanks for any of your thoughts!! Please click for the Larger view!

The exposure and scene is flawless... I really feel like I'm there and to me that is one of the highest compliments a landscape can have. You have really perfected this blending method so that it just looks, well, real... Mike

 

I really like this shot....Maybe it's a guy thing, I dunno. Nice capture!

 

Regards,

 

Mark

Thanks Mark and again to you Mike. This migrated from a fairly warm scene to something a bit colder, however, the color temp was set in Photoshop. I used curves to establish a nuetral gray from the foundation, but lowered the opacity to bring back some warmth. The process of blending has really helped in these situations, making sure I have detail throughout the scene. Another advantage, however, and perhaps just as important; the blend is coming from two files that have the majority of the information in the upper half of the histogram. The upper half of the histogram contains more tonal range than the lower half (something like 75%). Therefore, my overall image files are cleaner and are noise free. Previously when I tried to pull detail from the shadows, all kinds of creepy-crawleys would emerge. Now I am pushing information into shadows, a much healthier scenario.

In other words, you are generally "exposing to the right"? For the sake of discussion, you would take one exposure for the sky, but generally expose to the right and adjust in ACR to maximize the data from left-center to the right-side of the histogram. With your other exposure(s) you'd then go up the necessary number of stops to properly expose for the FG and shadows, and again expose from the left-center to the right side of the histogram. During your blend you'll then bring those together, i.e., using the data from the histogram except for the extreme left-side? Do you find that you use "Refine Edge" in each of these blended images; or is it more a matter only if you are getting some haloing. In other words, can you generally tell when the dynamic range of the blended image is extreme enough that it is gonna take some special work in selections and refine edge? Essentially, I gotta agree with Mike, this is pretty near flawless looking to my eye. Amazingly done! Cheers! Chris

Chris, this is probably more theory than actual truth, at the same time, the concept certainly must be at work when I am merging the two files. I use a selection to drop out the sky of the overexposed upper image. In order to avoid any haloes, I will feather the selection and resize it. The refine edge tool is a better tool for the job because it offers more modifications to the selection. In order to facilitate the blend, I usually need to refine the mask with additional "brushing" of the mask with low opacity settings, either darkening or lightening. This will unfortunately allow some of the "left side" pixels to come through from the bottom image, but only a minor amount, so it is not an absolute "right side" file once I have completed the blend. Additional advantages of blending are that I can be more precise with my exposures. I would need a bagful of grads to handle all of the variations of exposure, but when blending two files, I simply rely on my histogram readout to target the necessary variance of exposures. I have found that my files are so much cleaner throughout the range of tones and that there is more tonal range even in the darkest shadow areas.