Every photographer wants to get the most out of each scene with a single exposure. Unfortunately, that isn't going to be possible in many situations, for instance when you're shooting directly into the sun and want your viewers to see all the details in a landscape. In those instances, you're going to have to extend the dynamic range in the final photo somehow and that's going to mean bracketing your exposures.
(Success Tip: Learn Post-processing from one of the masters here.)
Now, I know that some of you are already rolling your eyes, thinking that I'm about to write about using HDR software. Nope! What I'm going to tell you about is a more subtle, refined technique called digital blending and it's probably something you've heard about before, but avoided because it sounds complicated.
The good news is that it's not as hard as you may think and by using Lightroom and Photoshop, you can pull great range from your bracketed photos, as well as correct white balance, reduce noise and apply lens corrections, while avoiding all those nasty side effects that can pop up in conventional HDR processing.
The even better news is that I'm not going to bore you with a long, detailed article about how it's done. Instead, I'm going to turn you over to our good friend Serge Ramelli and one of his excellent video tutorials. He's going to walk you through the process in a little over 15 minutes and you're going to love the results you'll get with his techniques. As always, he's going to drop some great tips for using the software along the way, so you'll probably want to bookmark this one to help you learn to improve your workflow.
Ready? Here you go: