36 http://www.digitalcameraworld.com
BETTERTONALRANGE
or this shot taken at 2am,
the stars were at their
brightest, but there was no
way we could capture the
near-pitch black foreground cliff,
or use torchlight to paint the
faraway sea stacks! So we needed
to take two exposures. For the
land we reduced our ISO to 1600,
for quality, and opened the shutter
for a full five minutes. It’s amazing
what such a long exposure can
reveal in the darkness. Then for
the starry sky shot we shot at
ISO4000 and took a 30 secs
exposure – any longer and the
stars would become blurred.%XPOSURE BLENDING
Take two exposures and blend
with Photoshop to reveal thestarry sky and darker land
F
Exposure blending in Photoshop
Open your two Raw images in Photoshop
or Lightroom and make basic adjustments,
keeping the white balance the same. Mask
out the sky of the foreground image in
Photoshop, and copy as a new layer onto
the sky image for a balanced exposure.Auto Lighting Optimizer
The Auto Lighting Optimizer (or ALO) is available as a
menu option on all current Canon cameras. ALO uses
selective tone curve adjustments to tweak the shadows
and highlights. ALO is set as Standard by default, but
you can set it to Low if you prefer that sort of look.
Or you can try setting your camera to the Strong ALO
setting – it’s useful for opening up those darker areas
in photographs. However, in our experience, highlights
can end up looking a little dodgy as you don’t have
complete control of the effect.30 SECS,^ F/^2.^8 ,^ ISO^4000
(^300) SECS, (^) F/ 2. 8 , ISO (^1600)