5.1. Taking Advantage of the Full Dynamic Range

The techniques I am about to show are all derived from digital compositing. Just a couple of years ago, ridiculously expensive movie production suites were the only systems capable of working in floating-point precision. That, and the fact that they lift all the weight of 32 bits in real time, was their major selling point. Nowadays, every off -the-shelf compositing package has the same capabilities, albeit not the speed. So these techniques work in After Effects, Fusion, Combustion, you name it.

However, I'll demonstrate them in Photoshop. Why? Because I can. The new layer and painting capabilities in CS₃ Extended allow me to do so. You've already seen how selective exposure adjustment works. I called it the human tone-mapping operator. Well, that was just a fraction of where this can go.