Is it Possible??? Can You Use Luminar AI to Combine The Best of Multiple Photos to blend exposures?

can you combine photos of different exposures inside luminar ai that is what we're going to find out in this video [Music] hi guys anthony turnham here and today i'm talking about combining multiple exposures in luminar ai first of all why would you even want to do that well as good as the dynamic ranges or most of today's modern cameras you're still going to come into situations where the contrast that exists within the scene that you're trying to photograph is too great for your camera's sensor to capture now my normal approach to get around this is to set my camera up on a tripod and photograph several different exposures some for the sky some for the foreground and then from there in post-production i'm going to use some dedicated software something like aurora hdr to combine them into a really nice cohesive and believable hdr image the key word in that is believable now i'm not sure whether or not the idea of a process for doing this is actually going to work inside of luminar ai even if it does it's going to be a bit of a workaround so if you're serious about landscape or architectural photography where you're going to be having an underexposed foreground overexposed sky and you're wanting to combine those things i've got a better solution for you and that's at the end of the video if all you have is luminar ai let's see if we can solve it inside of that let's have a look okay i have three photographs here one two and three two of them have different brightness values for their exposure so we have one darker shot here which was exposed correctly for the sky we have a brighter shot here which is much better exposure for the foreground and even the foliage and the cliff on the left hand side here and then the third exposure here this is actually taken with a neutral density filter over my camera and that allowed me on a tripod to get an exposure of around 60 seconds i believe now i'm not 100 sure so if i come down to the i icon in the bottom right that will tell me some metadata information so i know that i shot this with iso 100 with a 16 millimeter lens at f11 and my exposure length in seconds was 80.6 seconds so that has smoothed out all of the rough water that you can see here because the tide was coming in at this point i nearly drowned i was actually around the corner photographing you can just see a hint of these rocks over here i was photographing that stuff and i knew when i arrived the tide was on its way in and i had the potential of being cut off and that is exactly what happened i got cut off and i got very wet coming back on that experience i got absolutely soaked i couldn't actually see the rocks underneath the water where i was walking and i was a lucky boy to get back to this point actually and while i'm taking this photo i was soaking wet but that's an aside i'm still here but what i want to see if we can do is take the different exposures being this one this one and this component here the nice soft water and the maybe the soft sky definitely the soft water and using only luminar ai can i combine those photographs to use the best of both worlds the best of every single image frame that i've got so you may be thinking why don't you just for example brighten this photo up and if i come into my edit section and i grab the exposure slider and i actually bring that up you'll see that yeah i can do that the nikon d850 that i'm using it's got a really wide latitude for capturing details in the shadows but as you can see when i zoom in we've got a lot of noise digital noise going on here in the shadows and that's not a good look if i were to come to this photograph which had a brighter exposure in the first place just let luminar bring that in and then i bring this up i'm not having to bring the exposure quite as high to actually get detail back in here and if i zoom in and just let that pop into clarity you'll see that there's much less digital noise in here so this is a much preferable part of photo to use than what we had in the other one but the problem with this image is if i was to work solely on this frame only if i bring the exposure down and to the left so i'm getting a better exposure for the sky i have zero detail through this sunny area here nothing at all i can't recover anything if i push the exposure all the way down you'll see that it's basically just creating a dull washed out version of white here and that's just no good whereas if i was to use this darker version here so double click that exposure slider to reset it and you'll see that we've actually got detail through here you can see a bit of blue bit of orange we've got detail so if i bring that down you can see that all the cloud information all the sky information is all present in this photo so what i'm going to do is get the photo looking kind of the way i want it to for this one the same with the other exposure and then we're going to see how we might be able to combine these and this is the first time i'm trying this because a lot of people have said hey without layers now i can't do compositing and i'm hopeful that there is a slight workaround using the textures section within local masking so come along with me and we will see if this is possible so first of all let's get our photo looking good let's bring the exposure up slightly on this one let's have a play with the smart contrast yeah i don't think that's doing anything for us let's definitely bring down the highlights just to control those we can boost the shadows up a wee bit and this is just so that i can kind of get a sense for what the overall finished photo might look like and you may say for you and your purposes you are absolutely okay with using just this one file and you'd be well within your rights but i like to bring out the maximum quality in my photos because a lot of my stuff goes to print for people's walls as wall art things like that so i need to make sure that when people get up real close to the photo or print it very large there's no artifacts no defects so i'm just going to play a little more with the color balance i really want a nice warm kind of look for this one and what we're doing with the color temperature here we are going to mimic in the other photo as well now let me jump into the curves and just see if we can pull down a little bit of the highlights and still protect the shadow so on the left hand side of any curve you're talking to the shadows and the blacks the further left you go the further to the right on the curve you go you're controlling the highlight so as i pull this up you'll see i'm brightening the highlights we are equally darkening the shadows but that is literally because as i push this point upwards the corresponding curve to stay nice and smooth is forcing this part of the curve down towards the blacks so you go up and things get brighter you go down and things get darker if you want to remove any points that you've added just double click them and they disappear so it's a really nice way to work with curves let's jump into ai enhance because that's normally with the accent ai quite a good way to get a feel for just how much detail is in your photo and just how much you can recover from a file so let's add a little bit of this in maybe even enhance the sky that's bringing out real richness to those blues i actually really like that let's bring up structure ai and see what that can do whoa see i like adding some structure but as you push it to the right hand side you'll see that it introduces a lot of blacks and it kind of muddies things up a wee bit and you also get what i think of as a poorly executed hdr look so um and effectively that's what we're doing we're adding to the high dynamic range of this image that's what hdr stands for i'm sure you know that so the high dynamic range we're trying to reintroduce the dynamic range by including this component of the sky which is lost in that other version of this shot i showed you and combine the best of both worlds so we have more dynamic range but we want to do it in a really nice aesthetically pleasing way now i'm doing this purely as an exercise to show you guys how you could do this if you don't have other software capable of doing it lightroom can do this and does a reasonable job of creating an hdr file for me the best option for combining differently exposed photos is to use aurora hdr it's very believable and it's also like a one-click thing to actually do it so thankfully now gone are the days where hdr looked really bloody awful well some people still some people still do it in a pretty nasty way but you don't have to the ability to create nice hdr is there so as i'm talking to you about hd i've just done a crop to straighten the horizon there and i'm going to come down to this slider in the bottom right just to have a look if i take the effect away and then put it on if i go to 100 i can see that we've totally over baked this but i love this slider because we can just start to pull things back slightly so i'm pretty happy with that as a starting point for the sky i may just bring down these highlights just a little further just so we make sure we've got all of that detail there and now i'm going to synchronize that edit with the other exposures so what i can do is right click come to adjustments and copy those adjustments and then if i control click or or shift click the end photo and then right click i go to adjustments and paste adjustments i can paste those changes that we've made onto these photos as well and you can see pop pop they both change so when i combine these photos i have an option of which photo i want to work with as my base layer so as i jump to this one and thinking maybe i use this as the base layer i've noticed that the crop is actually not being applied when i've synchronized those adjustments so uh yeah it's not there so let's remove the crop from both photos that's a little annoying that it's not synchronizing that and we'll just hit this little arrow in the top right corner to reset it because we want the two photos to align perfectly and then we can crop the finished combined shot afterwards providing it works so i'm going to deselect all the photos and just start working on this brighter one so we know that the color balance of the two photos should match so what i want to now do is just make sure that this is kind of looking how i would want it to look i'm just going to drop the exposure ever so slightly and what i want to get right for the most part is the foreground and the foliage on the cliff side here and obviously this little landmass here as well because the sky is what i'm going to borrow from the other photo so if i'm happy with this part of the image in this part i just want to check my third exposure and this one has a different color balance even though the same figures have been applied to all three images my 10 stop neutral density filter actually has its own color cast and so that has been added to the photo so i need to actually correct for that and i'm trying to just match the color tone of this one the color balance with the other two images so although it's not the same in terms of numeric values i want it to look visually the same that's the key and now i am going to select by pressing ctrl and clicking on this image here as well i'm going to right click and i'm going to export both of these versions that i'm then going to be able to bring in as textures to the other photo i say i'm going to be able to i hope i am going to be able to do that so let's see if i can i'm going to crank the quality all the way to 100 i'm going to leave the format as jpeg for this one and now those are exporting and i should be able to introduce those as textures as it were into this other photo and then just paint those back in exactly where i want them now while luminar ai is much speedier than luminar 4 ever was the component that does take its time still unfortunately is the exporting part but for the most part i'm not worried about that because that's at the part where i've finished editing my photo i've done my work and i can set that exporting but i'm not worried about that because that's the time for me to head off and go and make myself a nice cup of coffee or go and see my kids but today we need to wait for them and that has now done that so let's jump back to this photo here and you'll notice that whenever you go back to a photo before you can start working on it again luminar is basically reapplying all of the adjustments that you've made to that base layer to that original photo and now we're good to go again so let's come over to local masking and this is where hopefully the magic is going to happen let's add a texture and now it'll be a case of trying to load the two separate photos we just exported as texture layers and then painting in the parts that we want where we want them so let's click load texture and let's start with this one and this is the smooth water so i'm going to just paint this in on the water here so where it's showing me red that is where we're going to be painting this effect in let's push the opacity of the brush up to 100 just to make sure we're getting it all and it's only the movement of the wavy water that i need to correct the water over here is fine as it is and now we're going to add the other picture we exported as another texture we'll load that texture double click that crank the opacity up to 100 and then we will paint this in just over the sky certainly around this area here because this was very important because that was the area that was bleached out in the original photo and so we're wanting to bring back that information so i'm doing this all at 100 so i'm really interested to see how this looks let me close this down and i am not convinced that that has worked uh perhaps if we increase the actual effect down here yes that was that was the problem i was getting really confused and concerned there as to why they had a level of transparency to them it is because the template or the edits that we were doing i had previously reduced that amount to about 70 and so i was only seeing about 70 of those textures overlaying so i was getting really confused as to why when i was using what i thought was 100 brush why we weren't getting 100 of the effect so now let me just turn this off that was our underlying layer showing at the moment and now let me turn it on and we've got a bit more of a believable sky because this is a more natural rendition of what was going on with the clouds there than the original version so that's worked now let's have a look at our water underneath let's turn this off and we see the original choppy water there and let's turn it on and we've got the nice silk and smooth water there and we could refine these masks so that things blend a little better like where i've gone over the edge here i've darkened that edge there so we could clean that up a little bit with a bit more refined painting if you were to do this in luminar 4 you could do this with layers and then use luminosity masking to get a really accurate mask around your darks and highlights but in luminar ai because things have changed slightly to with the with the aim of speeding up luminar ai and that certainly happened layers are gone so so this is showing me and you guys that it's quite possible within luminar ai to create images that have a lot of depth a lot of value information from shadows to highlights that perhaps your camera wasn't able to record at the point of capture and that's quite common i mean the nikon d850 has got one of the best sensors that money can buy inside of it and it still couldn't record the full range of lights through to shadows within this picture but with this little workaround we have solved that so let's look at our before and after so going from potentially blown out highlights and very dark shadows we've been able to get a full range of data right here what i want to do now is actually export this photograph so that i can work on it as though it's a brand new fresh file with all of the information available to me so let's pretend that i created a slightly better mask than i did for the sky and let's export this so we'll come into the export section and save photo to disk and this time i'm going to use the tiff format and that will give me a lot more color information to work with i'm also going to save this out as adobe rgb which is a bigger color space we have 16 bits rather than the 8 bits that you have with a jpeg file and while i can't put any more bits of data into the areas that i painted in because i've already saved those out as 8-bit jpegs previously having access to the full 16 bits of the file as a whole will be much more beneficial for me for my final edit so let's export this now i didn't actually notice where i'm exporting this to so it may not end up back inside luminar ai's catalog but all you need to do to make sure that that happens is just copy the file from your operating system in the folder that it's in whether that's mac or windows just copy that photo into the folder structure that luminar ai recognizes so for me to find out where that is i'm just going to click save to disk again and click browse and now i know exactly where i've saved that so here we have our files and you'll see that the tiff file that we just created is significantly larger in file size than the jpegs we exported but let me copy this and paste it into my file structure that luminar recognizes so on my c drive i've set up just a basic set of folders just to contain some photos that are here purely for video purposes demonstration purposes for you guys but this is what i love about luminar now that photograph exists within that landscape's photo when i come to luminar's catalog if i hop back one level in the folder structure and then dive back into landscapes you'll see that that combined photo is now available so these two photos should be identical but this one already has edits applied to it within luminar ai whereas this version i am fresh to go into edit and now nothing is applied i'm free to work on this photo as if this was a single in-camera capture so now i'm just going to have a quick play around and see how i want to finish this photo off let me just drop down the highlights slightly now is the point when i can come back and revisit that crop that didn't quite work out previously i just want to make sure that my horizon is nice and straight i like the fact that we come in from the top left corner here with this landmass and we come in from the bottom right with this landmass it's just little things like that to pay attention to when you're framing your photos up so i click the tab here that closes that down and applies the crop i could jump into the creative tab and now i'm free to use all of luminar's great creative editing tools such as mystical that could could help with this image here might want to add a mood to it so jumping into the luts is always a bit of fun so if we want to enhance the color grading effect we can come down and try these now i really like the cinematic toning options i always think they really help like i really like this purpley look for this image so let's go with that let's see if we push the amount up so now if you push the amounts all the way to 100 you can see exactly how it's affecting your image you know that you're getting a rich blue into the shadows and you're getting a ready pink into the highlights and now you know that you're able to say well how much of that effect do i want and as i've said before i think around that 30 mark that it defaults to is actually a really nice place to start you can add contrast or remove it and i don't really like to add too much contrast with the luts that i introduce do i want to saturate the image or bring the saturation back down i'm kind of happy where it is one thing i may want to do though just to help lead our viewer into the center of the image i mean we've already got nice leading lines that are kind of doing that but let's further enhance that just by coming to the vignette and we can push that pretty heavily just so we can see what we're doing decrease the size and let's feather this off nicely i always like to feather my vignettes quite heavily and let's see what sort of shape we want for this and we want to brighten the inner part of that not at all let's uh now let's play with the amount and get this exactly where we want it it was an evening shot so i'm not too worried about making this quite dark image i'm interested to see whether or not the atmosphere ai would help us let's push the amount all the way to 100 not get too freaked out by the fact that that looks absolutely awful at the moment and layered fog is what i'm going to be wanting to deal with and we can push the depth forward and recede it into the distance and i really like the atmospheric effects um the lightness we will want to probably bring that down just slightly and now the amount we can fade that i like to wiggle these sliders around and just kind of with my eye on the picture rather than the slider as i move it from right to left just get a sense of where do i want that to finish up and probably somewhere around there let's turn it off and on it's just a little something something but i like that so let's look at our before and after and i really like that edit and if you remember where we came from originally with this image and we look at our before and after you'll realize that we really have actually come quite a long way to this finished piece well i don't know about you guys but i think that is actually quite a feasible workaround so that you can combine photos of different exposures into one image but if it's something you do on a regular basis if you take a lot of photographs of landscapes or architecture i really strongly recommend you get hold of a dedicated piece of software for doing this for me the best one that i've found is aurora hdr the reason that i like using that is it can create a really believable composite really nice hdr by just basically importing your photos and that's it it's a fuss-free approach with really great results if you do want to give it a go there's a link below for a free trial so i would suggest you check that out i really hope you've enjoyed this video guys i thoroughly enjoyed making it from me to you much love and i will see you in the next video cheers

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 17,441

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Adobe, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, landscape photography, HDR, architecture photography, architectural photography

Id: i_1-0TssQHI

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 02 2021