Exposure blending is one of the most powerful ways to create a stunning photograph. As you’ve probably noticed, it can be difficult to capture an entire landscape accurately (especially those with a sky) because your camera sensor is limited to one aperture and one shutter speed at a time – it’s not possible to have two different settings within the same frame. You’ll often note that your photos rarely live up to what you actually saw – exposure blending is one way to overcome the limitations of your camera and photograph a landscape with the full tonal range that you see in the field.
Simply put, in order to have a well-exposed landscape you’ll need one image exposed for the brightest tones in your photo (typically the sky) and another for the darkest tones (the ground, usually) when the lighting isn’t suitable to capture it all in one exposure – think
of sunsets and how differently the natural light level is when you compare the sky to the ground. Once you have your two extremes, you’ll blend them together to make one perfectly exposed landscape.
Exposure blending uses the same principles of HDR photography in
the sense that we’re expanding the tonal range, but exposure blending creates a more natural-looking image – and you have much more control over the end result by manually choosing exactly where you want to blend your exposures together. It’s a method that is entirely customizable to your scene, which will produce a more pleasing result.
