3-stop soft graduated neutral density filter

I was out to Rocky Mountain National Park last year and I was taking a picture of a mountain lake at sunrise and a guy was using one of these rectangle filters. He said it helps with the lighter skyline and the darker areas of the mountains. My question is, can I just use Photoshop like I have been doing to make the adjustments or will I get better results using this filter. I am heading back out there in a month and I was thinking about getting one but I don't want to spend the cash if I don't really need to.

If you are not taking multiple exposures and combining them via HDR techniques, then a grad ND filter can be a big help in evening out your exposure when the sky is much brighter than the land. There are times that you can only get the shot using a grad ND filter (such as when there is movement in the frame), and other times HDR is the only way (such as when you do not have a well defined horizon).

Personally, whenever possible I prefer to get the exposure correct in the camera using filers versus having to spend time on the computer creating an HDR image.

I used a grad ND filter for the shot below. HDR would not have worked, due to the movement of the canoe in the frame.

There have been a couple of threads in this forum recently on the topic of filters-vs-Photoshop (i.e. "blending"), for example:

https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1304441

But the short answer is that it's mostly a matter of personal preference. Landscape photographers are increasingly moving away from using graduated filters in favor of blending, but some people just do not enjoy working in Photoshop or the process of shooting a scene in 'pieces.' For most scenes, you'll get better results by blending because you aren't limited to a simple gradient; with masking, your blend can be as irregular and as modulated as you want. You can of course do both too, and correct any unwanted darkening that a filter produces with blending techniques, but that is often even more work than doing a blend from unfiltered images.

So you might just want to experiment with both methods and see which best suits your methods in the field and your tolerance for post-processing.

Thanks guys for your input on this. I have been happy with the results I have gotten with photoshop but started wondering if a filter could give me better results. I think I might just go ahead and get one and try it out.

If you are interested, I have a couple of Hitech 85mm soft grad ND filters (2 and 3 stop), plus a 77mm holder left that I would let go cheap if you want to try something out. I upgraded to Lee filters recently and already got rid of the other Hitech filters I owned.

I cant really spare the cash for filters at the moment but find exposing for the sky and then bringing up the foreground in LR comes out really quite good!

Nascar Nut wrote in post #16238801
My question is, can I just use Photoshop like I have been doing to make the adjustments or will I get better results using this filter.

The principal reason for GND is to overcome the limited dynamic range of digital sensors and slide film (and negative film, to a lesser extent).