Exposure Blending

here's a typical high-dynamic-range scene this is a composition that's pretty common in landscape photography this is a pre-dawn or a sunrise scene the sun's just starting to come over the horizon back there the dynamic range or the range between the darkest and the brightest points in this scene is about 14 to 15 stops of light now modern DSLR cameras can record somewhere between 9 10 maybe 11 stops depending on the sensor design now if your scene contains 15 stops of light but your camera can only record about 10 no matter what you do with the camera all by itself something isn't going to be exposed properly either something is going to be overexposed or something's going to be underexposed exposure blending is a great tool to help combat high dynamic range and help fix this problem now in order to do this procedure you need to take at least two images in the case here I've exposed the upper-left one for the sky or the bright area of the scene this particular one is just shows you all the colors everything in the detail in the sky the sky is exposed properly this is my first image my second image is exposed for the darker is there areas around the dock the foreground area is exposed properly in this image now the term exposure blending is exactly that we're going to take these two images we're going to merge them together blend in a good sky with a good foreground and arrive at a scene that has a higher dynamic range than the camera could capture all by itself my name is Jeff I'm going to show you how to do this in Photoshop all right back at the computer now I've got both of my images I've did in the field up on the screen here in Photoshop version cs6 I'm using Photoshop for the tutorial if you do not have Photoshop that's fine the only thing that your software package needs is it has to have the ability to create layers and also ability to work with layer masks if your package has both of those capabilities it'll work just as fine as Photoshop also today I'm using a Mac if you have a PC that's fine just remember that when I say to use the command key on the Mac that's the control key so with both of our images pulled up here let's go ahead and get started the first thing we want to do is you want to get the one we got both of these images into one file so I'm going to start by selecting the good foreground image here I'm going to hit command a and you see I get the marching ants going all the way around I've selected the entire image next is to hit command C to copy everything to the clipboard then I'm going to go over here to the image that has the good sky in it and I'm going to hit command V and what I've done here if you look down in the layer window down here I've created a layer on top of the background in this one file if I turn off that foreground layer I just created you can see the good sky image behind with that this is the only file we're going to need so I'm going to make it big here so that I can see the entire the entire screen have one big canvas I can see the whole image to work on it the next step is to actually create the layer mask in order to do this we need to first select the layer that we want to put the mask on in this case layer one that we just created we'll select that then we go down to the bottom of the layer menu and there's a button called add layer mask we'll click that what we've done now is we've added a layer mask to layer one the layer mask is actually the tool that makes the magic happen and exposure blending so let's talk a little bit about how a layer mask works now we pasted this layer of the foreground image on top of the background image or the sky image if I were to click just on the layer itself and let's say I use the color black and I were to start painting on here you'll notice that as I paint on here its changing everything to black because I'm using the black color I'm modifying the actual elements in this layer I'll undo that if I'm going to use the a mask on the other hand and use black as well we'll use the black color something different happens as I start painting you can see what I'm actually doing is revealing what's happening underneath in other words this layer here I'm exposing or revealing the background layer into the foreground layer if I were to change my color to white and do the same thing and start painting you'll see that I'm now revealing that top layer again so it works almost like an eraser to get rid of everything that I just did I'm going to go back and delete all those because we don't want all of this mess in here but that's how a layer mask works it allows you to paint on the foreground layer and reveal what's happening underneath so let's get started with the brushing first thing we want to do is obviously select a brush tool so we'll select the brush tool from the menu on the left now the brush tool is critical to making this image as realistic as possible we're doing our exposure blending technique the trick is to make sure that your viewer can't see where you actually did your brushing if you can pick out where the brush strokes are it becomes much less of a believable image so the setting the brush tool initially is very important so let's start by pulling our brush options down I want some I want to brush size first of all that's fairly large you can see how big the sky is I've got a pretty small brush I want to set something up probably around I'm going to just select 600 that should be a good size yeah that's a good size right there the next thing I want to set is the hardness what the hardness does is it tells the brush how feathered the edge will be we want it to be very feathered we don't want a defined edge to the brush I'm going to set that at zero so we've got a fairly large brush and it's a very soft brush at the same time so let's go with those two settings right there the next is our pasted in our flow these are going to be determine what our footprint is as far as how quickly and how much in fact each brush stroke is going to have I want something that's pretty small so I'm going to start by setting my flow at 10% and that should give me a pretty easy small simple flow and let's just start painting as I start painting here actually I'm going to set my brush to black first and then I'm going to start painting it as you see as I start brushing across the sky you can see I'm slowly revealing the good sky underneath you notice I'm not getting too close to the horizon I'm just going really cool across the top here exposing a little bit at a time that sky underneath now you'll notice this is pretty slow it's not 100% all at one time we want to gradually do this and the reason this is important is is it will make your brushstrokes much less obvious to your viewer and there you go I've pretty much exposed most of the sky just by doing that now you think we're done but we're not quite yet there's one more thing that I want to point out you'll notice that there's a lot of color in the sky there's also color down here in the foreground in areas like this plus we've also got some some obvious spots here where we've got a little overexposure happening that's because in the original image of this foreground the sky was very bright and that was reflected in the foreground so we need to fix some of that a little bit we can use the exposure blending techniques to do the same thing so I want to expose or reveal some of that background image even in this foreground but I want to do it a little bit less gradual so I'm going to take my flow and I'm going to change it to about five percent ten percent now I'm going to go in and we'll start with these color areas I'm just going to kind of what I call just kiss these areas a little bit same thing up here and even in these areas here where it's overexposed a bit I'm going to just hit these a little bit so that we get a more gradual look to how these things are revealed it balances out the scene it makes it look just a little bit more realistic than it would otherwise and there you go that's a very basic exposure blending technique I have to point out that this particular composition is pretty simple you'll notice that the horizon is very straight there is not real there's not a lot of trees protruding up and you're not a lot of things you've got to work around order to make this happen so this is a fairly basic scene well next we're going to talk a little bit about a more advanced procedure where you actually have to work around some objects I'll make it a little bit more complicated than what this basic scene is now here's a little bit more of a complicated scene as you can see we've got we've got some rocks here we've got a lot of trees protruding into the sky some of them have leaves some of them don't a little bit more complicated blending technique is be required to make this particular composition work now this particular scene is of a moon rise not a Sun Rise so you it's a little bit deceiving you think with the moon that it wouldn't have the high dynamic range problems that a Sun or like a dawn or a sunrise or a sunset type of a scene would have but it is deceiving the moon actually creates some of the same havoc with dynamic range that the Sun can it's a very bright object in a very dark surrounding and so we have to do some of the same techniques with a moon rise as we would with a Sun Rise now I've already got this file set up I've got my top layer here is my image exposed for the foreground so we've got good in the detail in the front underneath it I've got my shot that was exposed for the bright area or the sky this particular picture has all the color in it so we're our goal here now if I step back and look at the scene if I want to get those wonderful colors in the sky up here without sacrificing the foreground detail now this is gonna be a little bit more complicated we can kind of see the horizon here if I turn off and go to the background you can see a little better you can actually see the horizon here on Lake Superior this is actually the temperance River going into Lake Superior you can see a little bit of horizon but it's not real definable so we're not too concerned with that what we are concerned about is we want to have this detail here but we want to have this color here so this transition here is going to be the most critical part we want to gradually do this blending here until we get the wonderful colors up here plus we also want to gradually do stuff around the trees in order to get this guy to come through now this is a very delicate procedure it's going to take a little bit of patience and very good technique with a brush so let's start out by selecting layer 1 creating our layer mask so we have a layer mask make sure that's selected make sure we have black as our color I'm going to select my brush tool I'm going to start out again with that 600 and I'm going to start out first we're going to start out with 5% on the flow and I'm going to start out down here at the bottom we also I should make point out we want to make sure that hardness is set at 0 I'm going to start out here at the bottom and just slowly start review some of this area around these rocks I want to make sure that we do this gradually that we don't get too gung-ho with this now you'll notice that I'm trying to stay away from those trees as much as possible I don't want to get too close and the reason is if I go over the trees too quickly and with too much they're going to black black and out it's going to they're going to look very much underexposed I don't want to do that so I'm kind of going in on the round of them a little bit and again I'm starting out towards the bottom because this is the more delicate area and I'm gradually just reviewing some of the wonderful sky underneath here but I want to do this gradual so that that looks believable it's a little bit at a time as I work my way up here and once I get this foreground area done I can start working on the sky so there we go with that now I'm going to go in and go around some of these trees a little bit now you notice I'm still keeping with the 5 out of 10 percent flow I'm going to keep it at 5 I am darkening some of these trees that's okay a little darkening isn't going to be a problem I just don't want too much darkening a little bit at a time and I'll start working through the top here and get some of that exposed all right I'm going to up my flow a little bit now I'm going to change it to 10% and that'll make things happen a little bit faster so we're not sitting here brutally waiting for me to get done with this procedure and again I'm being careful around the trees I don't want to get get it too dark I don't want those trees to end up black so I'm slowly revealing what I want the finished product here is probably not going to be a hundred percent of that background revealed I'm not going to have the full dark image that's back there if I notice if I turn it off right now you see that dark image is a lot darker than what I'm ultimately reviewing but I need something that's believable I don't need something that's dark what the what the goal of exposure blending is is to make your scene look the way that it did in real life in order to do that sometimes you have to do things a little sneaky and sometimes you may be in some circumstances like I had to do in this particular Sene I actually had to make that background a little bit darker in the initial exposure when I was taking that shot than what I knew I was going to end up exposing in the foreground in the final image that way I know that my trees aren't going to be completely underexposed and be completely dark if you look when I turn this front one off look how dark these trees are they're almost black I don't want that I want them to have some detail in them and so I actually overexposed or underexposed that sky a little bit so I have something more to work with and not have to reveal the whole thing and there you go much more believable image than what it would be without in this scene now the dynamic range is much more balanced and we were able to accommodate a lot of this complicated detail around here but patience was involved as well I have to go in here and do everything a little bit gradually and that patience is a virtue in this particular scenario you want to make sure that you do things gradually and reveal your artistic vision a little bit at a time that's exposure blending in a nutshell I've given you a very basic example of how to use this tool as well as what I would classify as an intermediate tool there are much more advanced ways of using this powerful tool some folks use what's referred to as luminosity masks where you can actually mask off or zero in on a particular luminosity or color in a scene and just work on that those are much more advanced skills and what I was able to cover today and that requires a much longer tutorial my goal today was to give you some basic tools to get this working in your photography this hopefully will open up a world of possibilities for you and I hope you'll find a way to include it in your art you

Channel: Eagle Vista Studio

Views: 20,192

Keywords: exposure blending, hdr, high dynamic range, photography, sunrise, sunset, neutral density filter, layer mask, Lake pepin, Lake superior, photoshop, Dynamic range, tutorial

Id: 6G8d8na6GIo

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2013