Double processing

Often when taking photographs it can be difficult to record details that we can see with our eyes. This is due to the limitations of the electronic sensor . One way around this issue is to double process the picture. Waterfalls would be typical of the kind of photograph where this technique is most useful .
This evening I led a night class , we looked at double processing digital files in photoshop to get as much detail as possible from an image. By taking the original photograph in RAW we can open it twice.

Firstly we opened the file and processed it once for the highlight detail and ignoring the shadows allowing them to go completely dark


In this picture the water is good but the shadow areas are too dark.


Then we process the file a second tile for the shadow detail.


In thios picture the water is completely burnt out, but the shadow detail is good.


We then placed one image on top of the other and by erasing different parts of the top image we end up with an image that has detail in both the shadow and highlights.


this is the final image, a combination of the two previous images, there is detail in both the shadow and highlight areas of the photograph.