Tip of the Day: Digital Exposure Correction

Creativepro.com has an excellent excerpt from The Photographer's Photoshop CS2 Companion by Mark S. Johnson about digitally re-creating a graduated neutral density filter. Graduated ND filters are used  by nature and landscape photographers to balance the exposure of a light sky and dark foreground. Now we have ways to get the same balanced exposure digitally.

The excerpt, found here in PDF form, explains how to use a layer mask and two different exposures of the same image to balance out the lighting in the scene.

This method is thorough but does require a tripod and two frames taken at different exposure settings to give you one for the ground and one for the sky. I have used a similar method of layer masking using only one picture, duplicating the layer and adjusting it to give me my "second exposure". This only requires one initial exposure and a few minutes in Photoshop, the downside to this method being higher noise levels in your darker exposure if the contrast in your image is too high.
—Matthew Panzarino
Contributing Blogger
Image: Mark S. Johnson