Full Dynamic Range Imaging

It is sometimes seen that an image must have a full dynamic range - basically no black shadows and no blown highlights - every bit of data counts towards the image.  
This piece will not argue the merits of striving towards the above  - it will just show you the results of methods I am aware of to help you approach that goal.

Martin has a tutorial on the Multi-RAW method  http://www.digital-monochrome.com/LEARNING.html

If you have a RAW image facility on your camera then that is probably the best way to go. If your image taking is not RAW then you have to live with images processed by the camera into jpeg's or TIFFs.  

So this document is linked off the monochrome forum and all this is in colour...'cos as Martin sez...you have to get your colour image sorted before you convert to monochrome.  

Methods 

Single image  

  Levels and blend

            Contrast Masking http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/contrast_masking.shtml

Bracketed Exposure

            Photoshop CS2 HDR

            Photomatix HDR http://www.hdrsoft.com/

            Photomatix  average

            Dynamic Range increase http://www.digitalsecrets.net/secrets/DynamicRanger.html

            Contrast Blending http://www.erik-krause.de/index.htm?./contrast/index.htm

Single Image

You have the one image and with various jiggery-pokery you may squeeze a little more out of it .
Duplicate image and apply different levels and blend can give you this... 

 ... and contrast masking can give you this. 

So a tadge of improvement but not a lot.
 

Bracketed Exposure

Either manually (as in this case) or automatically get your camera to bracket the true exposure with exposures at +/- 2 stops.

You are going to need a tripod for this and the object you are imaging must not move.

Photoshop CS2 has a HDR plug-in that will take the 3 images and combine them. You then have to convert from the 32 bit image to an 8 bit image. I just used the simplest defaults.    

There is a trial program called Photomatix that you can get from LINK

It will create a HDR from the three images that you then import into Photoshop CS2 or another viewer to turn into an 8-bit jpeg

  The Photomatix trial also will average the 3 images

If you do not fancy the HDR route and want control over what happens then there are two further methods.

Then there is  Contrast Blending

  And then there is the Dynamic Range Increase  

Probably the use of each method will rely on the time you have and the images you start with.

If anybody know of any other methods then I will add them in.