Lots of people are into the High Dynamic Range photos but sometimes they don’t quite turn out the way you’d envisioned. Here’s an interesting tutorial that uses Adobe Photoshop’s Layer Blending to create a ‘simulated’ HDR image by widening the visible range. Give it a try if you’ve got time.
Digital Photography School: Select the middle exposed image. Head over to your layers palette and click and drag your layer icon and drop it on your darkest image. Then select your lighter image and repeat the process. Obviously, you can have as many images/exposures as you like and continue this process till you have dragged all your exposures onto the one image. The more you have, the longer it will take to combine and the more complicated it will become, so choose your number of exposures wisely. You shouldn’t really need any more than 3 or 4 exposures unless your subject is particularly complicated.
Click back on your darker image that you have been dragging the layers on to. You should now have 3 layers in your palette and should look like this. You can close the other 2 images as these are no longer required. What you have left is one image open with your multiple layers, in my case 3, each layer containing exactly the same shot just taken with a different exposure all sandwiched on top of each other.
You can’t fully manipulate the bottom layer called ‘Background’, so select this layer, go up to the options at the top of the Layers palette and duplicate the layer. It’s not essential to do this on this particular retouch, but it’s good to get into the habit of duplicating your original layer so you always have an untouched original just in case it all goes pear shaped or you want to refer back to it for some reason. Safety first!
Click on the little eye icon on the left hand side of the ‘Background’ layer so it makes this particular layer invisible. You wont be needing this layer. It’s just there as a back-up. I tend to rename all my layers at this stage so it makes it easier to manage. Again, it’s not essential for this retouch, but getting into the practice of naming your layers appropriately is a good habit to get into. When you work on more complicated retouches that might have dozens of layers, it makes it much quicker when you can see easily which layer is which.
So what are we going to do with these 3 layers? We are going to mask out portions of each layer to allow elements from the layers underneath to show through eventually giving us 1 image formed out of 3. Let’s start with our lightest exposed layer. In my case, I want this layer for the water and reeds only. Most of the trees and the sky are way too overexposed. Over to your Layers palette again, select your top layer (your lightest layer) and we want to add a layer mask to this layer. Go to the Layer menu at the top of your screen and select Layer mask/Reveal All. As a shortcut, you can also simply click on the little icon circled and it will do the same thing. “