I wish my elph had auto bracketing

[kimberkit]

My first experience with combining exposures (and I did this trying very hard to keep the camera in the same place so I'd have the ability to combine properly):

Comments

[greyduck.livejournal.com]

Whoah. Nicely done. How?

[kimberkit.livejournal.com]

to both you and Jessica - sometimes, esp. at sunset/sunrise, the range of colors in a landscape is too big for the camera to capture. So I took one overexposed shot, which got the light right for the buildings, and I took one underexposed shot, which got the light right for the sky.

Then I pasted the dark version on top of the lighter version in photoshop. I made sure everything was lined up properly by lowering the opacity and checking to make sure all the edges made sense. Then I went the excessive-work route, and did layer->add layer mask->hide all, and used the paintbrush to paint the lighter areas back in to being darker, being extra-careful to get all the edges right, around the buildings. (Obviously, I used larger and smaller brushes). I painted some of the areas in the water that seemed too light... and presto.

[kimberkit.livejournal.com]

Of course, a real photographer with a real lens would use a graduated ND filter, (http://www.singh-ray.com/grndgrads.html) but a real photographer also has an SLR camera and $100-$300 to blow on a filter.