http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml
Looks like this'll work.
Mark.

Thanks for posting this Mark. I'm not going to thro out my ND filter, but I will play around with this technique as well.

This is probably the best way to do it if you've got the time, because you will have a lot more control over the final image. There are times that the ND filter will work probably as well too, and won't take the extra time in Photoshop so it's a good thing to use too. You can use either technique with either film or digital - just scan the film and there's the digital file!

There is also a lot to be said of shooting RAW and compressing the dynamic range in post process. If I am shooting handheld and make sure to perserve some hightlight information, I find that it works very well, take little time to postprocess, and can be done without a tripod. It's not a replacement for the other method, just another alternative. I am thinking of getting a one stop nd split filter to help with the highlight preservation in this technique.

Overall it's a process that works well. I still use my grad nd filters because I don't want to leave the photo sight without having a shot. I don't want to rely on photoshop work to finish the job. The time it takes to set up a filter, you can have ten finished photographs, but if you did the photoshop way you would have to combine a total of twenty images. That takes time and I'm not very patient with this.

Also, you have to be careful with moving objects if you take two exposures. If there is a bird that is flying then it will be at different spots, which doesn't work. Or if there is moving water, the same effect.

I use this process when I forgot my filters or don't have time to meter correctly. Another good time to use the PS method is when there are a lot of trees and you don't want to have that transition line.

Loren

As Loren says, trees have been the biggest kind of issue for me for landscape photography. Birds in the sky are easy enough to deal with but when you're trying to blend with moving trees it's a nightmare at times. I also can't stand working with twice the images if I don't have to. That's also why I like the RAW method someone else mentioned. GND's still have their place for sure.

I decided to give the PS technique a try on some throw away images, before I got into anything that I really wanted to save. So here is the before and after shots. I didn't spend much time on these, but it was nice to get a feel for how this technique works.

Combining exposures is something I found out only about 8 months ago. It works also when you work with 35mm film cameras as long as you have the nerve to align the different frames properly once they are scanned (and that can take a while, mostly if you are as tedious as yours trully!).

Here is another example that I posted a while ago in Critique.... In this example, I used a split ND (Cokin P120) which I keep complaining about because of its obvious magenta cast (I got rid of the cast in the combined exposure shot)... I also got rid of the filter! :D

I bracketed the shot at +/-0.7 EV. The medium shot was unusable. I decided to combine the dark and light shots and see what would happen. The result is quite pleasing to the eyes, even though the shadows are still blocked. While not a 'keeper', I think this shot illustrates well the advantage of merging shots with different exposures.

NOTE: In my (limited experience), combining exposures is applicable AS LONG AS you do not have more than 1.5-1.7 stop difference between the highlight and shadow shots. At 2.0 stop difference, you start having difficulties in merging the shots (they start to look artificial).

This is a great little trick, albeit time consuming.

I will not return my split NDs anytime soon though! :D


Cheers,

Steph.