Bay Light, photo by Harold Davis.

It rained hard over night, but this morning it looked like it was going to clear.

On the morning drop-the-kids-off-at-school run, I grabbed some photo gear. After dropping Nicky off, the view from Grizzly was great. I wanted to stop and take some pictures, but Phyllis said we didn’t have time, so she dropped me off to do my thing–with plans to pick me up on her way back from dropping off Julian.

A fresh wind was blowing the cloud cover away and it was cold–but as you can see, very beautiful.

I double-processed the Raw image for this photo, exposing it once for the sky and once for the foreground. I combined the two partial photos using a layer mask and the gradient tool, as explained in a nifty new book by Rob Sheppard Camera Raw for Digital Photographers Only.

Double processing means opening the RAW image twice, in this example once for the sky and once for the landscape. Each time you open it, you can expose it properly for the subject (the hills have a quite different exposure value from the sky).

The two open images are the same size and can easily be combined, best with a layer mask, resulting in a final image with a greater range of exposure values than would normally be possible in a single shot.