Balanced Scene Lighting

[kawazu]

Anyone know of a good way (maybe HDR?) to balance a scene both in foreground and with a bright sky without using an ND graduated filter? Right now I've been having to choose between a blown-out sky or severely underexposed landscape to compensate, even with a polarizing filter. The sky vs. land lighting changes often here and I need a solution that doesn't involve switching out filters on every shot (I'm poor and can't afford a plethora of filters). This could preferably be done via post processing so this thread might need to be moved to that section, but perhaps a multi-exposure shot would be a better solution? Any and all advice or knowledge is welcome!

[Murtasma]

HDR would be the best way. You can also try tone mapping a single raw or jpeg image, the results won't be as good as a tone mapped HDR image. You should be able to bring the shadows back into the scene if you tone map a single exposed image. If your tone mapping from a single image try not to over expose the highlights in the scene you will loose them. Working with digital, it's easier to recover shadows then highlights which you will have less success in recovering from a single raw.

[kawazu]

Thanks for the tip on using HDR for evening out scene lighting... I've been hesitant to use tone mapping/hdr due to halos and the fact that when I've shot them in the past I end up with very muted tones/texture in the shadow areas, essentially grayed... Unfortunately on the last shoot I was low on space (rookie mistake) and was shooting jpeg only and in single exposure, so I don't have the raw files to work with and I do have a consistently blown out sky.

If processing or shooting for HDR, is there a simple but better way than -2/0/2 exposure? Maybe a 6 part exposure would help prevent or lessen the evening out of contrast in shaded areas? Just trying to get decent results without spending a fortune on filters so any other advice is appreciated!