Easy Exposure Blending Trick in GIMP (Tutorial)

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you an easy exposure blending method using this is conversion to point ten point twelve which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial but of course before I get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always I have tons of and Inkscape tutorials on here as well as and Inkscape help articles so definitely check that out I have a brand new ebook that I just released called the book of layers everything you need to know about important layer concepts and features it's now available for purchase on Amazon or you can get it for free by becoming a Premium Member to Davies media design.com you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy or you can enroll in any my skill share classes by visiting Gibbs school comm of course I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so about a year ago I actually did a live session on my channel showing you how to create this exposure blending technique that I'll be going through today the only difference or the main difference I should say is that that method involved a plugin this method is actually a little bit easier and does not involve a plug-in and it's going to produce just as good of a result so here is the final photo using this exposure blending technique so in order to produce this final result or something similar to it on your end you're going to have to perform something called exposure bracketing and the technique for that is going to differ depending on the camera model you're using so I do recommend googling exposure bracketing for your camera but what exposure bracketing is ultimately going to produce is three different photos each with a different exposure level so you'll have an overexposed photo and underexposed photo and a normally exposed photo and I have done this already and so I'll provide the three photos that I produced in order for you guys to follow along and practice well once you have your three photos of course you'll need to open them up into so to do that I'll come over here to my file explorer and here are the three photos so I'm just going to click and drag these directly in the you can drag your photos on top of this little Wilbur Khan here all right so each one of my photos is now opened up into its own tab here so this one is actually the normally exposed photo this one here is the overexposed photo and this one is the underexposed photo I'm just gonna hit the M key on my keyboard to grab the move tool so you can see that none of these photos on their own really is a good photo they're all either underexposed or overexposed in some sort of way and this is where the exposure blending technique comes in because it basically blends the best of all three photos into one better photo so what I need to do first is I need to drag all three of these onto a single composition and I'm going to make it so that my overexposed photo is the bottom layer and I want the underexposed photo to be my top layer so I'll start with this photo all I have to do is click and drag on the tab here on the top drag it over here to the overexposed photo and then drag it on top of the overexposed photo and release so now we have the underexposed photo as a layer on top of our overexposed and let me just change the name of these so that it's a little bit less confusing so I'll name this underexposed if the enter key double click on here and name this over expose I'm just going to make it one word and now I'll come back over here to the normal exposed photo and click and drag that one and instead of dragging it directly on top I'm just going to come over here to my layers panel and drag it in between these two layers and release so now I'll change this to normal expose and I actually will make this one two words and let me just correct these alright so now we have our three layers so as I mentioned none of these photos on their own produce the final photo that I want so we will have to blend the best parts of each so let's just look through these real quick and just see which part of each photo looks best so the underexposed photo the reason I want that is that the sky looks best here it's not overexposed obviously nothing else looks great everything's too dark the Sun itself is also looking pretty good so we're going to want to keep elements of that if I hide that photo you'll see the next exposure or they normally exposed photo the Sun looks pretty good here as well the sky looks a little overexposed here but we could still keep elements of that and there's also some cool contrasting parts here with the rock that looked good none of the forests right here is really showing up so none of that looks really good so we'll want to mask that out and then if I hide that normally exposed layer you'll see here we have obviously the most detail as in any of the exposure layers so I will want to keep the detail in the rocks and in the forest the Sun in the sky here are really overexposed so let's see if we can blend these three photos together and just keep the best elements from each photo to do that I'll come over here and start by unhiding these layers so all three layers are now showing next I want to create a layer mask that's going to mask out those parts of the photo that I don't want to keep and the trick here to this technique is that we're going to use a gray scale copy of each image for the layer mask and we're only going to perform that on the top two layers we're going to keep the bottom layer as is so come over here to the underexposed layer right click and go to add layer mask and under initialize layer mask 2 I'll choose gray scale copy of layer and click Add so as you can see that's already blending the top photo with the bottom photo and it's creating a better result and if we come over here to the layer mask we can see what happens so we have a black and white version of our underexposed photo on its own layer mask and if I right click on here and go to show layer mask you can see what happens so for those of you who have read my book of layers ebook that I just released you'll know that anything that is black on a layer mask is going to create transparency and anything that is white on a layer mask is going to create opacity so looking at this anything that's black on here which is all these really dark underexposed layers from the underexposed photo is going to show up as transparency on the layer mask so in other words it's going to reveal the layer below and then anything white up here is going to be kept so the Sun is going to be kept and then parts of the sky and this part right here that starts to fade into black is not going to be kept for the most part so this is called partial transparency over here anywhere you see partial areas of grey so now come over here to my layer mask right click and click the show layer mask option again to hide it so now it's back to just normally displaying this so now let's repeat that for the normal exposed layer so right click go to add layer mask and under initialize layer mask - once again I'll choose gray scale copy of the layer and click n so that is going to do the same thing that's going to create a layer mask that is just a black and white version of my normal exposed photo and if I right-click on that and come over here to show layer mask you can see this is what the layer mask looks like for our normally exposed photo so it is keeping the Sun and parts of the sky much like we did on the top layer it's keeping more of the upper right portion of the sky here than it did in our under exposure layer mask but I think the main difference here that you'll notice is that it's keeping some of the details in here from the normal exposure photo layer so you can see parts of the detail inside of the forest and then as well as the rocks and what that's allowing us to do is keep some of those contrast II parts those detail parts in the normal exposure layer but then if I come over here to the layer mask anywhere that's black is going to reveal the bottommost layer which is going to be our overexposure layer so that's going to allow us to keep the detailed parts of our overexposed layer there and I'm gonna come back up here right click and just click the show layer mask option so this is the current final result if i shift-click this is what the overexposed layer look like on its own and then if i shift-click again this is what it looks like with the three different blended layers in here so there's still two main things that need to happen here to finish off this project number one is we can adjust the levels of our layer masks if we're not happy with the current results and then number two after that we're going to merge everything onto a single layer and then just edit this like we would any normal photo so let's start with that first part so I'll come up to the underexposed layer mask and come over here to colors levels and what you can do is just adjust the levels of this layer mask and that's just going to tweak what parts of this image are being shown or hidden based on the layer mask so if I like that I can click ok in this case I'm just gonna click cancel because I'm happy with it for now and I can perform that same thing on the normal exposed layer there so once I'm done with that process I can come over here to layer new from visible and that's going to merge all my visible layers onto a single layer and now as I stated earlier I can edit this like a normal photo so I can bring out the colors I can adjust the contrast and cetera so I'll start just by coming over here to colors levels and this is adjusting the levels of all three photos combined so here on the value channel this is really adjusting the brightness and contrast of this and I can come over here of course and adjust any of the color channels here which I'll do real quick I do have an entire tutorial dedicated to how to color balance your images using the levels tool so if you want to see a more in-depth look at how to do this and why I'm making certain Corrections definitely check out that tutorial but now I'm going to move on to my green Channel and once I'm happy with that I'll move on to the blue Channel all right so there's a quick edit so here's before and here's after that looks pretty good so I'll click OK next up I'll come over to colors saturation and I'm just going to turn up the saturation here to increase the intensity of the overall colors in here and I'll click okay now come over to colors color temperature and I'm just going to increase the color temperature of my image and the reason I'm doing this is because I wanted to look warmer since this was taken around sunset time and that's usually when the light is a golden color hence the term golden hour so there's a before there's an after and I'm just doing this pretty quickly here I'll click OK next I can come over to colors shadows highlights and I don't want to overdo this portion but I do want to increase the shadows a little bit here just to bring out some of the details and decrease the highlights here just to keep the highlights from being too out of control and I can also adjust the white point if I want to make this image overall lighter or darker in this case I'll just make it slightly lighter and I do have an entire tutorial on the shadows highlights tools to definitely check that out if you want more detail into why I'm making these adjustments so here's before and here's an after so I'll click okay so to finish off this tutorial I'm just going to sharpen the image and then add a vignette so I'll come over here to my visible layer and I'm just going to duplicate this hitting the duplicate icon and then I'll come over here to filters enhance high-pass and this is going to create this sort of gray overlay on here and what I'm trying to do with the high-pass filter is just enhance the edges of the details in my photo so keeping an eye on the edges here I'm just going to increase the standard deviation and I edited this photo earlier so I kind of already know what settings I want the set so I'll go to one point two five zero on here so there you can see the details are coming out you don't want the edges to be too thick over here so if I hold ctrl and use my mouse wheel to zoom in you can see some of the edges are being a little bit too prominent right there so come back over here and maybe just decrease the contrast to one point one seven five and maybe even the standard deviation will bring down to about 3.5 and I'll click OK hold ctrl and zoom out the details in our edges here so now I'll just come over here to mode and I'm gonna change the mode here to grain merge hold ctrl and zoom out and lastly I'll just add a vignette by creating a new layer will name this vignette and make sure it's filled with transparency and click OK and lastly I'll add a vignette but I'm gonna crop this first because I don't like how much sky there is in here so come over to my crop tool I'm going to check the fixed aspect ratio option and I just set this to 16 : 9 and I do have this at the landscape mode so now I'm just going to click and drag my crop like so and I actually like the way that looks so I'll just double click that will crop out a lot of that excess sky there now create a new layer and I'm just going to name this vignette and I'm gonna fill it with transparency and I'll click OK then I'll come over to filters light and shadow vignette and I'm going to increase the radius here so that I don't have as much black going on in the corners I'm also going to adjust the softness because I don't want it encroaching upon the middle of my image as much so I can decrease the softness here and I can also increase the gamma to help with that so there's a before there's an after so very subtle vignette and I'll click OK and there's our final image so if i shift-click here's what the original looked like this was the overexposed photo shift click on the show/hide icon again here is our final result alright so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did you could subscribe to my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davies media design don't forget to click the bell icon to be notified every time I have a brand new tutorial you can also check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video so thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 26,631

Rating: 4.9276485 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp 2019, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, exposure blending, gimp 2.10.14, exposure bracketing, photo editing, photo manipulation, exposure, saturation, shadows-highlights

Id: ohz6XQeg8io

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 09 2019