Here's how you can deal with a landscape scene with an extreme dynamic range.
No doubt most of us have found ourselves in the following situation… You’ve discovered a beautiful landscape scene that you’ve carefully composed in your camera’s viewfinder. Your camera is on a tripod and there’s no wind, so you’re feeling confident that you’ll be able to capture everything in one shot with both a small aperture and a slow shutter speed. Things are looking great!
This is why I feel that it is much more important for me to try to edit my photos to replicate what my eyes and brain experienced at the time than exactly how my camera captured these scenes. If my eyes can see the details in all the highlights and shadows, then I’d also like to be able to capture those details in my photos.
It is said that there are “many ways to skin a cat”, and I have no doubt that there are shorter routes to achieve some of the steps described in my workflow. I obviously treat every image differently, so my workflow is not exactly the same every time. Some photos will be quick and easy to edit, with minimal adjustments, while others may require much more work to get them looking exactly how I remember seeing that scene at the time.
My first photo was taken with a 1/13th second exposure. Although this was the perfect exposure for capturing the details in the white clouds, unfortunately most of the rest of the photo was completely underexposed. It’s always easier to recover details from the darkest areas of our RAW files than from the brightest areas, but I realized that no amount of shadow recovery would ever reveal all the details in the darkest areas of my first photo.
So why didn’t I create a mask and then brush out only the brightest parts of my luminosity selection, instead of pressing the Delete key ? This is because I never want to change the relative luminosity of any of the elements in my composition. When I only darken the sky and clouds, then I run the risk that something which is reflecting that sky might become brighter than the sky itself.
Next, I use my luminosity blending technique on the lower image of my vertorama. We are now able to see all the smallest details in every part of the photo. This image could be a lot brighter without compromising the highlights, but it also can’t be too bright, if I’m hoping for a realistic result from my stitching software.My panorama stitching software of choice is called PTGui.
Adding mid-tone contrast allows us to preserve the shadows and highlights, while only applying contrast to the mid-tones. That was exactly what I needed in this particular situation. Although I was fairly confident that most of the colors were accurate representations of my experienced reality, I now felt that the greens were a bit too green and also a bit too bright. The yellows, on the other hand, were neither yellow enough nor bright enough.
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