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Unfortunately, it doesn't work well at all with the sample raw files provided by Guillermo Lujik. There are nasty highlight artifacts. Granted, the difference is 4 stops, not 3. Adjusting the sliders so that one gets rid of the highlight artifacts also seems to get rid of the reduced noise.
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Jani,
Jonathan's method seems to be an improvement over other blending techniques I've come across, but it still relies upon post-blending skills in Photoshop.
I struggle with Photoshop techniques. I know I should spend hours and hours pouring over Photoshop manuals, but for some reason I'm reluctant to do so. Is it a fear of becoming a nerd, or is it just I'm a lazy student who wants the glamour but not the hard yakka? I don't know. A bit of both probably.
I mentioned before, in blending images there's often a halo effect around borders between high contrast transitions. I don't have the skills to get rid of these, at least without painstaking hours of work.
I'm thinking that maybe GLuijk's method offers a quick solution to this.
If you've got the patience, I'll go through a processing procedure I used to blend a couple of images that varied by 4 stops, using Jonathan's method. The final result is not perfect, and not to my complete satisfaction.
The following is a scene of a 5 star hotel 'ensuite' in the foothills of Nepal. (5 stars is relative, you understand ). The cost for one night in this luxurious accommodation was just US$4. That's less than 1$ per star . I wanted to capture the scene out of the bathroom window, as well as the bathroom itself.
One shot would simply not do. So I brought my tripod into the bathroom and took a series of 3 bracketed shots.
Here's my attempt at blending 2 of those 3 shots, using Jonathan's method.
(1) The initial blend. Jonathan's recommended settings for "This Layer" should be varied according to the circumstances. It might be right for exposures differences of 3 stops, but my exposures differed by 4 stops, consequently my split layer values were not 35/220, as Jonathan suggested. but 28/43, based upon eyeballing, not mathematical calculation.
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Having flattened the image, I then proceeded to use the limited but familiar techniques I normally use to get the image into shape.
First, a curves application to raise the shadows.
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Then a shadows/highlight adjustment.
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Then a levels adjustment.
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After the levels adjustment (ctrl click on RGB channels, reverse selection, layers levels, 80% opacity), the levels histogram looks like this.
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So here is the rather flat image lacking in umph!
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The problem is; how do I get from this rather flat image to the final vision without introducing artifacts around the edges of the window frames?
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