How to get *this whilst keeping detail? Exposure blending?

Unfortunately, I couldn't get much EXIF info on the photo. I don't think this is an HDR

Every time I try to do something similar to this, the original image (shot in RAW) is blown out. I try to (under)expose for the horizon to keep it from blowing out. Then in post (via Lightroom), I'll pull the highlights slider down, bump up the shadows, and then adjust the whites left-of-center, and blacks a little right-of-center. Obviously add saturation, etc.

Buuuuuttt it doesn't quite come out anywhere as close as I'd like.

Anyone know the secret behind these images? Maybe exposure blending? If so, could someone provide a resource on how to do it? I haven't been able to find any decent exposure blending tutorials (or software). I use a Mac, so a lot of the software to do such things is unavailable to me for the most part.

Image not by me, but by another photographer to whom I do not have the name: http://25.media.tumblr​.com …2evVeQE1royd1oo​1_1280.jpg

First, if this isn't your image you need to post a link, not the actual image.

Second, if you want to be able to do this with one shot, get a D800

Personally, I can see this being HDR, or manually blended.

Seems to be a darker halo around the sun. That's usually what I get when I try to blend 2 exposures. Then again this kind of looks like a cell phone photo, so maybe in-camera/phone HDR?

I don't particularly think it's taken from a cell phone, because look at the detail in the grass. Bear in mind, the image was probably sampled down a fair bit, so it may look a bit P&Sish. Nonetheless.

The D800 seems like a good deal, buuuut I think I'll stick with Canon. ;P

How do you go about manually blending a photo? Again, I can't seem to find any decent tutorials on it.

First, what software do you have?

use tripod , take a bracketed shot . post it over here . we'll do it for you. how difficult or easy it
is all depends on the scene. the picture that you refer to is considered easy one.
you need photoshop for this ps element will do but it is better to have cs. first you process
both the overexposed and underexposed images seperately to get details of highlights
from underexposed image and details of foreground from overexposed image.
then in photoshop you select overexposed image as background layer and the top of it
you put underexposed image. then you use quick selection tool or channels or any other
method say brush tool to make a mask. and use this mask for masking. result may look
very artificial at first. to make it blend well use gaussian blur to blur the mask(in cs5 i
use it's full strength i.e.250) then you can use very soft brush and with low opacity,
and flow to fine tune this mask.

Scatterbrained wrote in post #16370598
First, what software do you have?

I use lightroom and photoshop. I also have photomatix, but I hate it. Wish I hadn't had bought it.

nittaya: that's what I try to do, but it just looks really, really terrible. But I'm not that great with photoshop, to be honest.

quadwing wrote in post #16370758
I use lightroom and photoshop. I also have photomatix, but I hate it. Wish I hadn't had bought it.

nittaya: that's what I try to do, but it just looks really, really terrible. But I'm not that great with photoshop, to be honest.

as i said it depends on scene some scenes are very difficult some are just piece of cake
blurring the mask heavily is the secret trick .just try.the picture that you refer to is very easy one
i bet the photographer used gradiant (black to white) for masking. i do digital blending and
believe me it looks very easy to me. i am no pro infact i know only few tools in photoshop
such as level adjutment, gradiant tools, saturation sliders,masking but i use blending mode
such as luminosity, soft light , overlay heavily. and this is in nutshell all i know about photoshop.

I do just fine with photomatix, maybe you just need to learn how to use it. Have you tried their 32 bit merge to HDR plug in yet? You can Select your images, do your basic global adjustments and then merge them to a 32 bit Tiff without leaving Lr. Then edit the Tiff as you would a raw file before sending it to Ps for fine tuning.

As far as manually blending in Ps you can use Luminance masking for that. Google Luminance Masking Tutorial and you should get quite a few hits.

If you want to do it the easy way shoot film. Literally the more I shoot digital the more I go back to film when I need big dynamic range. Even using dual ISO with Magic Lantern doesn't get me close.


But I know we're all set on digital, phlearn has the best tutorials for stuff like this:
http://phlearn.com/