Soooo .... I am posting this for two reasons: 1) I'd like some suggestions if I'm doing something wrong 2) I think RAW is amazing.
So, on the top of the hardest trail in Moab (Pritchett's Canyon), I wanted to grab a picture of me overlooking and conquering the canyon ...
Here's the first photo I snapped:
The temperature is obviously off and the clouds are all blown out. So I severely underexposed the next photo (mind you, handholding).
Thinking I could merge them somehow; well I'm not an expert with layers and need to learn more but I found a "Photomerge Exposure" option in Photoshop Elements. It didn't work out great, gave me weird colors:
So ... then I re-visited the severely underexposed image, and the Camera Raw plugin isn't updated and won't update, so using Canon's free software I pulled this bad boy out. It's really soft, and the guys kind of got in the scene, but I got all the color I wanted out of it.
Let me repeat: this is simply from overexposing the severely underexposed RAW image up top (2nd).
So ... Anything else I can try? I can try scene cleaner to remove them but that doesn't work great with the difference in exposure and it's not my top priority anyways. I'm mainly looking to get a clean looking photo. I've tried copying over only the clouds but I'm not sure what to do to help match all the colors. I'm amazed that my compact camera pulled this picture and RAW still had so much data stored in it. So anything I can do to make it a better picture?
In any case, here are the pics from the trip: https://www.facebook.com/media…06987&type=1&l=3d8058da6b
Thanks!