The Trick for Expanding the Range of Your Photos

As good as today’s digital cameras are, there are still some scenes they can’t accurately expose for (like backlit situations, for example). Even though the human eye automatically adjusts for these situations, your camera is either going to give you a perfectly exposed sky with a foreground that’s too dark, or vice versa. Well, there’s a very cool trick (called double processing) that lets you create two versions of the same photo (one exposed for the foreground, one exposed for the sky), and then you combine the two to create an image beyond what your camera can capture!

Step One:

Open an image with an exposure problem in Camera Raw. In our example, the camera properly exposed for the foreground, so the sky is totally blown out. Of course, or goal is to create something our camera can’t—a photo where both the foreground and sky are exposed properly. You can tweak the white balance, recovery, fill light, etc., a little, then just click Open Image to create the first version of your photo.