High contrast situations be extremely challenging for the landscape photographer. Expose for the highlights or the sky and you can lose shadow details. Expose for the shadow details and you can burn out highlights or wash out the sky.

The situation in this shot of a railway bridge is familiar enough. A deep blue sky would darken the details along the right side of the river. Try to get more brightness along the river bank and the sky would wash out even more.

I used a tripod for the shot. Set the Canon 10D to use mirror lock-up. Fired off shots with a range of exposures. If you read threads on sites like DPReview, you will read advice to composite two shots with layer masks to combine highlights from one and shadows from another. Michael Reichmann, definitely one of my favorite landscape photographers, has written an excellent tutorial on the technique, "Understanding Digital Blending." I was ready to apply the technique.

As I weighed my options, I decided to use two photos but not to composite them. Instead, I replaced the washed out sky in the image above with a radial gradient that used colors from a shorter exposure that had richer sky colors.

What gave me reason to pause was light seeping through the trees. It seemed that this was going to be a tough extraction. Actually, it was quite easy to isolate the sky. I used the Magic Wand with a Tolerance of 50 and the Contiguous box unchecked. It only took a couple of clicks with the magic wand to select the sky.

A few pixels were selected in the water and on the bridge. They were easy to fix. I switched to Quick Mask mode and painted them out. Before I left Quick Mask mode, I applied a slight Gaussian Blur (2 pixels) to soften the selection.

The substitute sky was a radial gradient that used blues from a second shot. I drew a diagonal for the gradient from the lower right to the upper left.

One suggestion I received was to insert sky from another image. The problem was the sky reflection in the water. The colors for the sky needed to be similar to the colors for the water. Using a radial gradient composed from the sky colors reflected in the water would be a better match.

What remained was to sharpen the image and brighten the colors. The colors were a bit muted.

I used my TLR Sharpening Toolkit to sharpen the image. I used USM with a luminosity mask and relatively aggressive settings (Amount = 175, Radius = 1.5, Tolerance = 0). I applied a second round of USM on a new duplicate layer (alt-ctrl-shift-n-e) with last week's tip on Localized Contrast Enhancement (Amount = 20, Radius = 50, Tolerance = 0). That took care of sharpening.

I added "pop" to the colors with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Saturation for Reds, Greens, and Yellows were boosted +15.

All that was left was a few finishing touches . . .

Fred Miranda says "Photography is painting with light." I agree. Sometimes an image has too much dynamic range for film or even for digital capture. With a digital darkroom, we can add the sky that our creative eye sees when we snap the shot!

Enjoy!!