Photoshop Magic

There is a lot more to photography than some times meets the eye, that is why today I'd like to share with you a bit of the post production magic that goes into some of my work.  Merging images is something I usually only reserve for architectural and landscape photography.  In an ideal situation, I'd be able to capture those perfect exposures in one shot, but often times, I find myself shooting outside in the middle of a bright day and I know I'm going to have to compensate using Photoshop.

Without going to photo geeky on you all, here's a quick tid bit about how our cameras capture light.  Our camera sensors are only capable of recording a limited range between light and dark way less than our eyes see, that is why on a bright sunny day your shadows go super black, or your highlights turn stark white.  The camera is just not capable of recording the huge difference between that light and dark, so that's were merging comes in.  With a lot of patience and a little bit of skill you can take a pretty awful set of images and work them into something more like your eye sees.

So here's a little insight into one trick of the trade.

This is the final version of five photos merged together.  You can see the two extremes below that I started with.

Again, here is the final image taken from five images with the extremes being shown
below.  In this case, I removed the pool vacuum hose from the shot for the final.

This is simply two images merged together.  As a strait shot, either the forground
or background would be properly exposed, so here I had one exposure for the
grasses and shrubs and another for the mountain in the distance.