Kernuak said:
Personally, I don't like HDR, except on some occasions (there are some good examples). It is far overused in my opinion and in many cases badly (which makes the technique look worse than it is). Putting that aside though, there are many scenes where it just simply doesn't work, such as scenes containing snow to name one example. Also, adding gradients in Lightroom or Photoshop isn't going to recover detail that isn't there in the first place. If the sky is blown, then gradients are a waste of time, at best, you'll get bright white areas, at worst, you may also get weird colour casts. It's far better to use a grad (or two) to preserve the detail, even if it isn't quite enough, so that the detail is there for recovery in processing.
You could do that and I have blended in the past, but I don't really have the patience for sitting editing, I'd rather use my patience waiting for light
. Slightly illogical maybe, but it's probably that I've had enough of sitting in front of a computer at work.
You misunderstand me.
The gradients aren't of colors or curves or whatever.
The gradients are in the mask and allow you to choose which portions of which exposure are seen.
Take one exposure -2 EV. That's your sky. Take another exposure +2 EV. That's your foreground. Put the +2EV on the bottom layer and the -2 EV on the top layer. Add a mask to the -2 EV layer.
On that mask, add a gradient that results in solid white at the top, solid black at the bottom, and a transition gradient somewhere between. How wide the transition, where to place it, and what angle to place it at define the characteristics of your virtual graduated ND filter.
Now, imagine you've got a scene with grass in the foreground, a patch of bright snow in the middle ground, dark (shadowed, forested) mountains in the background, blue sky, and a few bright puffy clouds. No way are you going to get that all in a single exposure with any ND filter ever made, but that's not a problem. Shoot multiple exposures, one for each part of the scene. Then, create your own custom ND filter in post using layer masks.
Of course, this assumes you know something of at least the basic principles of Zone exposure. You wouldn't want your exposure for the snow to put it at middle gray; you'd want it as bright as you can get it without clipping. And that shadowed forest needs to be as dark as you can get it without blocking or getting noisy (though you'd probably overexpose it a bit in the scene and pull it in post). The grass and sky, of course,
should be close to middle gray, and the clouds should probably come from the same exposure as the snow.
Then, the challenge in post is nothing more than creating the proper masks for each of the layers.
Cheers,
b&
)
