Before the wedding

Posted by Andrew Gould (Sydney, Australia) on 13 September 2007 in People & Portraits and Portfolio.

Chile, January 2006.

A very difficult exposure due to the extremely high contrast from the deep shadows indoors to the scene outside the window. Solved by using a blended exposure made up of two versions of the original RAW file: one for the shadows and the other for the highlights.

Update to these notes:
Mandy asks, below about blended exposures. Here's another photo where I also blended two diferent versions of the same RAW file. In that case, however, I used a more time consuming variation for blending (explained there), which I only use if the automatic way, used here, doesn't give good results:
http://andrewgould.aminus3.com/image/2007-08-07.html

Here's the link to the article, directly:
www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml

In this present photograph, I used the quick layer mask method, as described in the above Luminous Landscape article.

I actually try to avoid using the blended exposure technique as much as possible. I find it much simpler to habitually underexpose by 2/3 of a stop in contrasty situation (i.e., almost all the time), to not burn out the highlights. I then bring out the shadow detail in postprocessing.

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