I took this picture of the Yaquina Bay (Oregon) lighthouse by blending two separate exposures. This is my second or third try with this technique, so I don't have it perfect yet, but this one turned out fairly well.
1) I took two shots using a tripod with the exposure 2 stops apart. One stop overexposed and one stop underexposed from the center-weighted meter reading.
2) In my photo editor, I opened the darker exposure and selected all and copied it to the clip board.
3) I closed the dark exposure and opened the lighter one, then created a new empty layer and pasted the dark picture from the clipboard into the new layer.
4) I created a Layer Mask in the new layer and then copy and pasted the lighter picture into the mask.
5) I adjusted the opacity of the Layer Mask to around 60% or so until I got a pleasing blending of both exposures. I wanted the foreground to have minimal detail, the shadows to have some detail, the sky to be blue and the lights to be soft.
Has anyone else had experience with this sort of thing?
What suggestions can you offer?