Landscape Study

While taking bracketed photos of this waterfall, I was confused as to the optimal exposure. The sky was a much brighter exposure than the rest of the cliffs, which were in the shade. Maybe there would have been some way to expose for the sky, and with some super flash light the cliffs, but since I didn't have a few thousand lights around, I experimented with a few other options.


This is the original photo. The sky is blown out because it is so much brighter than the rest of the photo.



This next photo takes the sky from a less exposed photo and it is layered in during post work. While it does not look completely real if you study it, it does seem to have some balance.


Pushing this one step further I tried exposure blending. While this gave me some sky detail back, it was not as much as when I took the sky for a different exposure.


Then to push it to the extreme, I did an aggressive unsharp mask on the rocks to bring out the local contrast. This is the picture at the top. While it is clear that it is overdone, I like the effect. Perhaps when I have more time I will experiment with different amounts of moderation.