PhotoWalkPro

Getting the shot right in the camera should always be the goal of any photographer but sometimes the shot you want is beyond the camera’s capabilities.  So what do you do when you know what it is you want but you know you can’t get it in one exposure?  In those circumstances, you can shoot for Photoshop.  Here’s a good example of what I mean.

While walking in a cathedral in Bruges last week I saw a beautiful stained glass window at the end of a large hall.  I wanted to capture the entire scene but when I shot with a proper exposure for the hall, the window was completely over-exposed.  When I shot to get a good exposure of the window, the hall became so dark that you couldn’t see any detail.  To remedy this, I decided to shoot two exposures with the intent of combining the two images in Photoshop.

To get the two images as one, I adjust the images in Lightroom and then opened both of them as layers in one Photoshop document.  I then had Photoshop align the two layers and used a layer mask to combine the best parts of both.  I am sure that some of you are wondering why I didn’t shoot an HDR and the truth is that I considered it but I think that the processing would not have given me the result that I was after.

So here’s another shot that I took with the intention of fixing it in Photoshop.  I’m not going to tell you what I did but take a look at it and see if you can figure it out (Jeff and Scott Kelby are not allowed to comment).  I’ll post the answer on Friday.

Related posts:

1. Shooting for Photoshop – Part 2
2. Shooting Digital IR
3. Shooting for Black and White
4. Photoshop vs. Photomatix Pro
5. Photoshop is not DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 12:02 am and is filed under Photography, Photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.