Sorry I have not posted in so long, but nobody reads this anyway. Please e-mail me if you actually read this. Anyway, this photo comes from Sleepy Hole Park in Suffolk, Va. It was shot in early November when the autumn leaves were in their prime. It was a shot I had in my mind since early summer, so I brought all of the gear. The problem with this shot was that it was taken during midday, so it was impossible to properly expose the entire scene with one shot. Either the sky or the trees would not have the proper exposure. Therefore, I took several bracketed shots at different exposures to capture all of light in the scene. I imported the Camera Raw files into Adobe Lightroom, converting the files to DNG (Adobe's nonspecific standard for digital raw files). The DNG files have 16-bit color depth, so I could retain the maximum amount of data in the highlights and shadows. I did some initial tweaking of the files in lightroom before opening them in Photoshop CS3 for further editing. I merged the two best shots of the trees and the sky using the script in Photoshop CS3 called "Load Files into Stack." I arranged the layers so that the shot of the properly exposed sky was on the bottom. I applied a layer mask to the layer with the properly exposed trees, and painted out the areas containing the overexposed sky, revealing the properly exposed clouds and sky from the layer beneath. A few more adjustments to the levels and curves, with a little unsharp mask, and the photo was ready. I flattened the layers and converted the image to 8-bit in order to save it out to jpeg for posting to the web. If you like this photo, you can purchase a print from my gallery at www.gregrosatiphoto.com
For some more really good tips, check out the "This Week in Photography" blog and podcast at twipphoto.com
