In photography, the difference between brightest and the darkest areas is known as dynamic range. Our camera cannot capture it as good as our eyes see when there are very bright and very dark coloured objects in our images.

Take this fruit bowl as an example:

If you expose for the fruits, the details on the dark wooden bowl are lost. But, if you expose for the bowl, the green grapes and the apple are over-exposed i.e. too bright.

We will now see how to overcome this problem with exposure blending:

The general steps in any photo-editing software are as follows:

1. Open the over-exposed photo in the software. This will open it as the background layer.
2. Open the correct exposure photo as a layer. This will place it as a top layer on the over-exposed background layer.
3. Add a layer mask and initialize to White (full opacity). This means that…