Just did some experimenting with exposure blending. As I am not even remotely familiar with 2D image manipulation, I did not expect any results at all.
On friday night (about 8 p.m.) Nicole and I went to get some fresh air, in Bonn’s Rheinaue. Weather was nice, beautiful sky, water, trees and grass. But not a chance to get everything correctly exposed in one shot. Perfect situation for exposure blending. I did the simple version:
- take a light version
- take a dark version
- layer those over each other and cut the dark/light parts from the top layer
The result is far away from being perfect, I am not good at all using gimp’s magic wand (see the ugly dark-light change at the top of the trees). But I think, if you’re fit at doing these things, it’s a real easy way of producing nice pictures without checking for the right exposure-settings for hours, if possible at all.
Maybe I will now read this article and look, how I should have done it 
Another approach to exposure blending stacks the diferently exposed pictures over each other, not opaque, but with lowered opacity. Then for each layer brightness curves are adjusted to only show certain brightness levels. Probably a much softer blending mechanism, eliminating any possible edges between the different pictures.
Just to mention, most people do not like exposure blending, but prefer producing HDR (High Dynamic Range) pictures instead, with 12, 16 or more Bit per color, in order to balance out over/under exposed parts afterwards.
talking about exposure experiments:
On this shot I misused my bicycles handle bar as tripod, shut the lense close (f/8.0), ISO fixed on 50 (as I do on almost every shot now) and exposure time to 1/3 sec. I was pretty surprised by the result. Did not think that this effect was that easy to achive, need to try these things more often
You have a few helpful options! Probably I will think about trying this kind of by myself.
Utterly indited subject material , Really enjoyed studying.
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