Exposure Blending in Photoshop with Sean Bagshaw

hello Bleeker is here with f/64 Academy and f/64 elite and recently I've received a bunch of requests on exposure blending and it's a topic that really I don't do a whole lot with but a couple people have asked hey how would I use exposure blending with your blend if techniques or with some of the panels that you have and quite honestly it's very difficult for me to answer that question because I don't do a whole lot of exposure blending because of years ago I tried it and I didn't like it but I don't feel like that's a very good answer so I reached out to an exposure blending guru and asked him if he could help me with some exposure blending techniques and he's gonna do that right here on f/64 Academy hey Sean can can you hear me can you see me oh I am Blake yeah I can see you I can hear you can you see me I can hear you but you know how these things are they're all they're all different zoom they're all different let me fire it oh there's my video okay let's see hey sweet there you are how's it going man let's go good how are you doing good to see ya good yeah good to see you too so in like the last three weeks I've had several requests for exposure blending and here we talked in out of Oregon quite a bit about what our specialties were and in the car as we were you know driving and I heard a lot about all the various things that you know and they sound like a guru at this exposure blending stuff whereas you know I tend to go the easy route so I'd love to hear your thoughts on this exposure blending stuff and yeah I got an image that I'm working on that I think could really use it and I'd like to see what you got on it yeah sure yeah glad to show you it's great timing because I actually have a question for you about color theory so yeah maybe I'll answer your question and you can put that on your channel and you can answer my question I'll put that on my my channel and we'll get both our questions answered perfect and then everyone learns in the process this is awesome let's do it let's do it okay so yeah exposure blending you know it's something actually that is I I think it's still really important and useful it's becoming less important as camera dynamic range you know improves and it continues to improve it used to be that if you had very much contrast range in the light at all you were outside the dynamic range capabilities of your camera you know back in about kind of start shooting digital like on a Canon 10 D or something didn't take much before I couldn't maintain all the highlights and the shadows in one exposure so exposure blending was the only way to deal with or bracketing exposures and then blending them somehow however you did it it was the only way to deal with those kind of high dynamic range situations today's cameras can capture so much more dynamic range is that a lot of those situations that used to kill us in the past you can get it all in one exposure now you know most cameras you did you expose for the highlights then you can recover the shadow part later on you're fine but there's still are situations in the world where the dynamic range of the light is just too great even for today's cameras so in those situations if you want to be able to see all the the colors and details from the brightest highlight all the way down the deepest shadows bracketing exposures is a good way to go and then I like to blend exposures in Photoshop using layer masks and masking techniques because for me I feel like that's how I get the best information that my camera recorded you know all the places that were properly exposed for the highlights I use those pixels and all the places that were properly exposed in a different exposure for the shadows I use those pixels and so I'm not you know having some algorithm kind of mooching all my pixels together to create some HDR file that's not my original pixels anymore right yeah I used to I used to have a website called everyday HDR calm ah back in the HDR days yeah and then I had to rebrand because cameras got better yeah rebrand or bust right there you go well this is a technique that like I said I don't use it I probably use it on less than 10 percent of my images but when I need it it's really nice nice to have so let me let me just jump over here to share my screen so this happened to me in Oregon actually you know it was a sunset and there was this beautiful light in the background for ground was really dark cuz it's at that time with the Sun is right there cresting and that's the kind of dynamic range that even now the Sony a7 5-million can't even yeah can't even get that kind of dynamic range cuz it's above fifteen stops of light you know there was just too much going on so this is really where I'm gonna use it when I run into those situations exactly yeah and they do crop up and you know shooting right into that bright a bright light source usually the Sun is something that can create really dramatic imagery you know you get backlighting rim lighting you get really deep shadows that's you know looking right into a sunset or a sunrise is where you get those really great sky colors so we want to do it sometimes so this is a way that you can kind of have your cake and eat it too you know so so let's just start so I've got a couple examples here I can I can work with you on the first one is a simple one just to give the basic concept and then we'll go to a little more kind of come more advanced version of it so here I have two exposures this is a scenario where you know shooting again this is sunset shooting right towards where the Sun was it was behind these clouds but but it was still too much dynamic range for the camera at that time when I had my sky properly exposed then my foreground was all blocked up and to recover that much shadow detail would be really noisy and not just not good quality there when I exposed for my foreground then of course now I'm over exposing the sky so two separate exposures I want to bring the best of the pixels of both of these exposures together into one image so I'm just going to come in and edit in Photoshop and I'm going to edit these in Photoshop just as a layer so it opens them as layers in a single image document here and for this easy technique I'm doing it this way when we do the more complex one and I'll use a slightly different method but we'll just show you this with this let's move us down here so I can see us alright so here we go we've got our two layers and it opened them with the lighter layer on the top the darker on the bottom it really doesn't matter you can go either you can go with this from either direction but for me how I usually do is I usually have my dark layer on top so I'm just going to move that to the top right now that makes sense to me and so I've got my dark layer on top I've got my light layer on the bottom I want to use the pixels from up here in from the dark exposure and the pixels from down in the foreground from that lighter exposure now one of the things you need to make sure is that your two exposures align properly and as long as you set up on a tripod and the tripod didn't move then they should align just right out of the camera but if they don't align you can select them both in Photoshop and go to edit right here Auto align layers that's one way to get them to line up and let Photoshop Auto align them but sometimes if you've got things that are moving between the two frames like the clouds moved or a wave moved it'll try to line up the things that moved and then it'll get your actual static landscape out of alignment and that doesn't always work so you can also just lower the opacity of that top got make sure you have one selected 50% I think you do it with the difference blend mode which also works well anyway and then with the move tool then you can just use the arrow keys to nudge your two layers into alignment that way so once you get your images aligned you just want to make sure they're aligned then you're just going to add a white mask to that layer and on a mask white reveals that layer and black shows through to the layer that's underneath and so for something that's really simple like this just ocean horizon and it's kind of misty out there so there's no really defined transition point between those two exposures or where the the light in the dark is so you can just use a gradient on this which is really simple so here's the gradient tool and I'm just going to drag a gradient on that mask across there and let that do my blending and I can draw different gradients until I get that transition from one exposure to the next where I want it so I think it looks the most natural and maybe somewhere in there so that's a really simple and that's like the easiest quickest blend you could do and you can still work with this mask if you want to pick a white paint brush or excuse me a black paint brush maybe like the 30 percent opacity if I want to bring through that's too much just bring it down to like 10 percent just bring through a little bit of the lighter exposure in some of those areas yeah a little exposure blend there i've brought together those two exposures so i've got a properly exposed image all the way through now that's about the most simple version of exposure blending that you're gonna get but that's the basic concepts it's you got a light exposure and a dark exposure a layer mask and you use the layer mask to decide which pixels from the dark exposure you're gonna show and which pixels from the lighter exposure your going to show so that's the basic idea I think I try to overcomplicate it you made that look really simple oh well this is a simple example I started with a simple one but let's let's go to that more complex example here well what I like about that too is that it gives you more control because if you use an HDR program or if you use Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw to say merge to HDR you don't know what it's doing exactly so there you get more control and it's largely global you know there I could totally decide which pixels I was keeping from which exposure and where whereas when you do an HDR blend it's blending the whole image so you know you can't pick and choose and decide how much of the effect you want where right because you couldn't say hey give me a 30% of that sky it's gonna say hey well I gave you what I gave you you're gonna eat it if you like it or not it's up to you exactly yeah all right so now let's go to this this example here it's a similar to seascape but it's a little more tricky because I've got a you know a more defined skyline here and let me just go do I've got a more defined skyline going along part of this so part of this transition from light to dark is a hard edge but then up here the clouds are kind of obscuring the the transition zone it's it's kind of more of a smooth transition you know where that cloud is there's no exact edge that I could make a selection along or try to paint along or anything like that and then also down here in the water I've got you know bright areas and dark areas of water and there there's no real defined boundary so I've got some areas of hard edge some areas of more soft edge and some areas that are just becoming all over the place that would be really hard to do a blend using that technique I used on the last one so let's look at what we could do instead so for this one I'm going to open up both of these and these are raw files that I haven't made any adjustments to if I go to the develop module here we can see that these are just raw straight out of the camera I made any adjustments to either of these now I'm just going to open them both but this time I'm not going to open them as layers in a single document I'm going to edit in Photoshop but I'm opening as smart objects in Photoshop and when you open images as smart objects out of Photoshop now and this is a this is actually a bug in Lightroom and Photoshop is which one would open there sometimes what it does is when you edit in smart objects you've got to selected it only opens one so I have to try to open the other one now so you can get them both open here do we get them both now I'd open both of them yeah so the first time it only opened one second time and opened - all right so now we've got the light one here and the dark one here which is great but the problem is we need them both in a single image document and we can see that they're smart objects by the little icon here in the corner and when you open images this smart objects out of Camera Raw or out of Lightroom those are what are called linked Smart Objects they're actually linked back to the original raw file so different than if I had opened them not as smart objects if I'd open them as a regular image file like a tiff file and then made them a smart object if I double clicked on it it wouldn't take me back to the original raw information but if I double click on this it does it opens up Camera Raw and now I've got my raw adjustment controls and if I had made any pre adjustments to my raw image here back in Lightroom those adjustments would be showing up here right now and anything I do to this will be saved not back in Lightroom in the orig you know raw file but in this smart object here in Photoshop so anyway that's the power of opening as smart objects is you have access back to that original raw information so now I need to get these stack together in an image document a single image document and I can't just like copy and paste because then we rasterize the smart object and that's not what we want we want to keep it as a smart object so the way to do this is the one way there's lots of ways hold down the shift key with the move tool hold down the shift key and click on one image and click and drag it up to the tab of the other or if you don't have these as tabs you just have them open and kind of fit in the screen if you should see them both at the same time you can just drag it on top of the other one but if you've got them as tabs up to the tab until you see the other image then bring it down and release and it'll lay that smart object the dark smart object right on top of the light smart object and then I can just go ahead and close that other one I don't need it anymore okay so now that we've got those stacked as layers they're smart object layers the next thing I'm going to do is use a luminosity mask to blend these with and this might work with blend if also I'll be interested to see if you can make this work with blend if but with with a luminosity mask I'm able to use that for the transition zone so that it will perfectly feather both those sharp or hard edges as well as the areas that don't have real defined edges now there's lots of ways to make luminosity masks I know you and I both probably use custom panels for that but if you don't have a panel to make luminosity masks for this you actually need a very basic luminosity mask just a lights luminosity mask but I'm gonna make it from the from the lighter layer so I'm going to turn off that dark layer so it's not visible and I'm just gonna hold down ctrl and click on the RGB channel in the channels panel here and that'll load a lights luminosity mask and then I'm going to apply that mask or sorry that selection as a mask to that top layer so I'm going to turn that dark layer back on and and I'm going to just make a mask and that luminosity mask will be there and we can see there it is and already that's kind of helping with the blend but the place where we want the blend to happen is just like I said in these transition zones I don't want any of the real dark darks to blend I want those to come from my completely from my lighter exposure and I don't want any of the light lights to blend I want those to come from my darker exposure so the next thing I'm gonna do is grab the paintbrush tool and I'm just gonna paint on that mask and I want to paint with black and I want to go all the way to 100% it's a very soft feathered brush I'm just gonna go full I'm out here and I can just paint down here and take out all of the the part of that mask down here where I only want to be seeing what's underneath and then same token I'm gonna go to a white brush and up here in the sky I'm just gonna paint all of the sky out up here 100% white and if we see what that looks like I'm now bringing in all of the sky up there so now what I have is this luminosity mask that's only helping with that transition zone not with the sky not with the foreground it's just going to work with blending the transition zone now we see the magic well first of all that's already a pretty good exposure blend but it doesn't blend perfectly like up in the corners up here it's not quite a good tonal match yet I think there's some other is where the mountains look a little bright or the sky looks a little dark so we want to work with that and this is where the smart objects come into play so I'm gonna open up the dark smart object first and go back to the raw settings and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna adjust this to imagine what if I was trying to get this image to look right from just that dark exposure only and what I'm gonna do is maintain those dark skies but I'm gonna be opening up the exposure in the foreground here it's going to help match and blend in that transition zone and even if it brings up more noise out of those shadow recoveries down here we don't care because we're not going to be seeing the image from that exposure down there because it's completely masked out so open that up and here's where I can't open up my shadows and maybe bring up the blacks a bit maybe bring up the overall exposure bit and bring down the highlights to maintain the nice colors and texture in that sky but all I'm doing here is just getting that foreground to match closer to that lighter exposure back in Photoshop and this is just help with the blend like I said it doesn't matter what's happening down here and if I get noise down here because it's only going to be using some of these pixels in that transition zone so we'll wait for it to update and already it's blending a little more smoothly and now I'm going to open up the lighter exposure and do the same except for I'm going the other way with it I'm gonna try to recover these brights and make this area here more like it would be if I was trying to work just from a single exposure so I'm gonna bring down the highlights and I may bring down the exposure and we can see that this is why I can't do this from a single exposure because there's parts of that sky that are just not recoverable but if I bring that down and I may bring the shadows see up a little bit under see ya I'm not sure which way and the nice thing about the smart object is you can come back to this and do this over and over again so if this doesn't quite get it okay that's better but I think it kind of darkened my foreground a little too much so I can just open that up again let's see let's bring up those shadows a little bit in the foreground a little bit more even and this is that lighter exposure so this foreground now is going to be really clean it also has the wave motion and this ray of light coming through the center of these rocks that's what I want from that exposure and that's what that mask is giving me so let's let that update and there we go okay so now I've blended these two exposures I've got the best pixels up here from the darker exposure the best pixels down here from the lighter exposure and if we zoom in and take a look at the transition that luminosity mask which looks like that which is controlling that transition zone you can see we don't have any halos no obvious edges no obvious place where I painted and even up here where these clouds are misting across those mountains it's just a really smooth natural perfect blend so using a luminosity mask like that to control your your transition zones in combination with the the smart object so that you can help those transition that that transition zone blend better between the two exposures I find makes really good natural-looking exposure blends Wow yep I'm sold so well and this is what I'm interested to see because I you know I'm using a luminosity mask to do that I'd be interested to see if this same principle would work with with a blend if blending approach but still with the the smart objects to help the blends own or that transfer transition zone yeah I'm gonna try that I'm gonna try both techniques you know the nice thing about a mask is that you can you know hand paint on them a blend if it's more stringent in that it adapts to what's ever underneath it which is great but at the same time you can't really paint in where you want that blend it to be or not so I'm gonna see I'm gonna play with this because I think that there's something here on this one but in the past I had tried exposure blending this is probably back in like 2015 you know our techniques weren't quite there Doby camera on lightroom weren't quite there people were going away from HDR and going more towards exposure blending I was still in the HDR train in 2015 didn't want to jump off I was moving too fast for me so but I tried exposure blending and I was never really sold because I couldn't get that transition to be right but here you know I was I was either like it's an if this or that thing but you're saying well no why why it can be both you know we want this for this we want this for this and let's just use this little strip here as our our blend and that's that's awesome yep exactly right yeah so I find that that works 90% of the exposure blending situations I get into that technique works really well and once you get good at it it's fairly fast and yeah the results just look good and like I said that way you're working with those original pixels that your camera actually captured not something that's been you know algorithm together by some software somewhere right right and you know that's what it's all about you know when we you know as you said we both use different forms of panels to do this and it's kind of funny because sometimes people will email me like well Sean said to do it this way I'm like well that's cool you know and they're like well does it upset you that Sean did it this one like no should I be upset that Sean did it that way like oh we're all friends here you know we are in competition you know we had so much fun in Oregon that you know it at first I when I first met you in Oregon I was like I don't know how to talk to this guy now we just assume everybody's friendly and friends so you know that's me walking around which is probably I'm probably stepping on toes and making people angry because it's like who does he think he is it's awesome well that was that was a lot of fun and yeah I agree and the the fun think one of the really fun things about Photoshop and about photography is is that you know it is it's a creative artistic process it's about how do you get to an image that you like that speaks to you and maybe speaks to other people and there's so many different pathways you can take there and different tools and skills and with that variety we all get to choose what works for us and how we want to go about doing that right yeah and then you point out that that's awesome and we're all gonna do it differently regardless which is actually kind of cool is that you know we're all gonna learn something different from somebody else and then what we get to do is then take all that we've learned from each other and turn into a technique that works for us by the way our brain works and I think that's really cool so I'm gonna I'm gonna try this here after we get off this phone I'm gonna try this and see what I come up with and I'll let you know about that awesome well good luck yeah I mean I'm I'm psyched to see what it you know how it works for you and what you do with it just let me know if you run any issues I'd be glad to help you out with it it's awesome to have a personal Sean bag show there to help me up it's awesome to have a personal Blake Rudess from f/64 Academy to help out with color that's awesome all right cool well I'm gonna hang up cuz I'm inspired now I'm gonna go try this and yeah you'll see what I did in the conclusion of my video that I'm gonna put up on YouTube and and you can see what I did with Blake stuff in the video that I'm putting on my channel on YouTube Wow it's like it's like YouTube inception oh my man great chatting with you good to chat with you t Blake take care man alright so it was awesome that Sean was able to hop on here and show us his exposure blending techniques so what I've done is I've taken his idea of the exposure blending and I'm gonna break down and give you a couple examples here so what you see on the left hand side this is an HDR image from this series of brackets and from Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom and what I've done to all three of these I've applied the same basic adjustments that I would normally do to my photographs I haven't gone out to an outlandish post-processing I wanted to keep this really simple so this is an HDR process and Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom that has then been color graded and also has some of my blend if and zone system techniques on them this is Sean's example of an exposure blend where he showed us that that very beautiful transition between the areas that we want to transition with him one another in those two exposures and I love this technique and then just as Sean was saying in the video hey I wonder how that would work with your blend if techniques so what I did with this image was I took that same concept of the exposure blending that we had in Sean's video but I combined it with some custom masking and I can just brush this out here too this doesn't need to be here with some custom masking and the blend if and we can see the blend if if we turn on our color overlay here and we turn on that color overlay this is the only area that's really being affected in the image so that's basically where the blend if is being added to this photograph it's just barely happening in this scene here but you can see that when we zoom in here the mask itself is all white but you can see how some things are poking through the the mask there that's basically blend if being used as a luminosity mask to help blend those two exposures together and really between Shawn's example here and this example here they look almost identical so as you can see here does it really matter whether we use a luminosity mask or a blend if not necessarily and it's not an if this then that it's not it if you're gonna use this panel or if you're gonna use this type of mask you have to do this you know there's there's things can blur and they can no pun intended things can weave when it within one another so that you can create a really good exposure blend technique from either using luminosity masking using blend if or even if you want to stick with the traditional HDR method and do HDR process that's fine as well for me I'm really liking this these exposure blending techniques that Sean Bagshaw showed us I think there's some real value in there especially getting that nice little sliver of luminosity mask to just blend exactly what it is that you want to blend together and the idea of using smart objects together with that it's really cool John's website is outdoor exposure photo calm go there to see some awesome video tutorials from another educator that I respect very much he's been doing this stuff for a lot longer than I have and is phenomenal in his trade of teaching his photography is also great I've got a great gallery there that you can peruse through you can really tell that he's a craftsman in Photoshop to create the images that he creates also if you would like to subscribe to Sean Bagshaw on YouTube there is going to be a subscribe button at the end of this video to go to Sean's page and subscribe to his YouTube channel and also underneath that will be a video that I did for him on color grading on his channel so we did this kind of like video flip flop it's a really cool concept that way you get double the education in one day really cool and we also have to send a big shout out over to Sean and thank him for his generous offering of time to show us his workflow process with exposure blending it was really unique and I'm thinking something that we can all add to our toolbox thank you very much for taking the time to watch this head over to Sean's youtube channel to check out my video on color grading [Music]

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 35,644

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Photoshop, Adobe, sean bagshaw, how to blend exposures in Photoshop, luminosity mask exposure blend, exposure blend, sean bagshaw exposure blend, how to blend two exposures, easy exposure blending, exposure blending real estate photography, exposure blending in photoshop, exposure blending lightroom, exposure blending with smart objects

Id: hXsAZ03JQm8

Length: 29min 3sec (1743 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019