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Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
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priority or Manual exposure mode. Also, be careful
that zoom lenses don’t shift focal length during the
bracketing sequence. (You may also want to make
sure that your Picture Controls contain no
Auto
settings, as the camera may vary those settings
between shots.)
3.
With your camera on a tripod, take the bracketed
sequence of pictures.
4.
In Photoshop, open the three images and place them
into three different layers of a new image (sometimes I
take a shortcut and just use the two extreme
exposures). Use Photoshop’s layering tools to control
which parts of each exposure are used in the final
image.
Obviously, this technique works best if you have a sharp
delineation between the shadow and lit areas of a scene, or
have areas with little or no interesting detail in which to hide
transitions between the exposures. How good your resulting
image looks is in large part attributable to your Photoshop
skills, but I’ve seen some remarkable images created this way.
These images would be very difficult to duplicate with film.
Better still, use the D300’s bracketing sequence to create
images for Photoshop’s
Merge to HDR
function
91
. This new
ability
automatically
merges multiple shots taken at different
exposures into a single image with a potentially massive
dynamic range. A few caveats apply:
•
You need to bracket using shutter speed (changing
aperture would cause focus differences). Thus, make sure
your camera is set to Aperture-priority or Manual
exposure mode before bracketing.
•
You should take at least five photos, and the function
seems to work nicely with 1 stop bracketing (giving you
91
This feature first appeared in Photoshop CS2.
