Photoshop: Blending different exposures

The video clip below shows how to blend two different exposures together to take elements of both photos in an attempt to get the best overall exposure. The photos were kindly taken by Catherine Murphy on a recent training exercise – thanks Catherine! The exercise involved using exposure compensation and bracketing to take multiple different exposures of the same shot. Photoshop CS4 was used in the screencast but a more or less identical set of steps can be used in Photoshop Elements-V9 as this version of Elements now supports full layer masking. (Note that Elements costs approx. €80 whereas CS costs closer to €1000). The technique can also be used in versions of Elements prior to V9 but there is a certain amount of black magic required with clever use of clipping layers etc. but it does work. I might add an additional screencast at a later date to demonstrate this.