Mixing Exposures - LONG & SHORT EXPOSURE + Photoshop Tutorial

hi guys and welcome to this week's vlog now a bucket one of my favorite spots to do some shots which is Blackpool and the reason why I'm here because I'm I'm actually going to replicate a shot I took probably about seven or eight months ago now but the reason why I'm here replicating the shot is simply this the images I take one I'm generally at the seaside or of seascapes I tend to use a long shutter speed I just personally like that smooth out see but when I smooth out the sea I tend not to like the blurriness of the sky in other words I'm not saying that I don't like the blurriness of the sky 100% but more often or not I tend not to like the blurriness of the sky so what I tend to do is I tend to swap them over so in other words I'll take two shots one with a faster shutter speed to freeze the detail in the sky and all that cloudy information and then I'll simply combine them both in Photoshop afterwards and because I do that because I tend to do that quite often lots of people are asking me in the comments can I please make a tutorial on how I do that simple as that so that's what this flow is all about [Music] let me very quickly talk you through my set at them so the first shot I'm gonna take a shot using these the wave breakers as a lead-in line going out to the pier in the background and these are Mike Spisak these are my current settings no going to get splashed this is my current settings about f-16 imma ISO 50 on to really desensitize that sensor to enable me to shoot with a long shutter speed then when my 10 stop filter on there I've managed to achieve a two-minute exposure I've got 2.9 soft Brad on the top there two soft grudges to try and bring some more of that detail down in the sky and really that's it going to let the camera do its thing over a 2 minute period so you know over 2 minutes I'm gonna get a really flat water but if you look at the sky in actual fact if you take a look at this image now if you look at the sky that I've got and I will say this over over again it's very subjective if you like it if you like the blurry steins sometimes I do as well then that's perfectly fine but more often or not like I said earlier I'm not really a fan so I'm gonna let this 2 minute exposure play out and then I'm gonna reset my camera and take a faster exposure shot to bring the detail and freeze that detail down in the sky and then it's a case of taking it into Photoshop and post-processing [Music] okay so now we've put these pictures into Photoshop I'm going to show you how I basically swap the skies over I'll show you three different shots that I actually took on the day but the shot in the video that's not the one I'm going to show you in terms of swap in the sky because that's too easy I found another one that there's another element to it that makes it slightly more complicated we're only very slightly more but if I show you that one then you'll benefit more from it so first of all let's just take a look at the three images so that's the first one that I actually took any of you seen it before and the after now of course you're gonna have to titillate that shot quite a bit but if you look at the before and the after there you can simply see the intention is to keep the smooth to see but that blurry sky there I'm not keen on so we're just going to swap it with that sky there I did the same again a little bit later on and this works very well in my honest opinion I like this an awful lot so once again that's the blurry sky that I don't like and replace it with the actual sky on the night I don't see this as a composite picture because I'm not using a false sky I'm actually using the actual sky that was there so as far as I'm concerned it's not really a composite picture but again it's all subjective and I'm not suggesting for a minute that you have to like it it's entirely up to you but that's what I prefer to do sometimes I like the blurry sky but more often than not I want more detail in that sky and the third one which we're going to concentrate on is this particular one here and so you can see that's the shot I took of the pier and that's a nice long exposure shot there as well we managed had to wait for ages for that wheel to start turning but over I think a two minute exposure we kept that quite nicely and that's the shot with the actual sky in there and if I just do that there okay so that's the original shot and that's the long exposure smooth an that see out now I actually like this particular picture as it stands even though it's not a smoothed out see I think that that four or five second exposure there is just enough to capture some drama in that sea however well I'm going to use this particular picture as a dam or for our demonstration purposes simply because there's an element of well it's a little bit more complicated to do but the whole process is actually very easy to do so let's go for it then let's stop let's start from fresh this head into bridge and grab these two pictures if I can find them well they did it okay okay so these two here okay so both of these pictures have opened up in a CR I've already made a few adjustments but the adjustments are just very basic adjustments there's nothing very special in there the video I did before that which included Mary she'll then I actually took my time in Photoshop to show you how I made the very same adjustments so if you're not sure about the or making adjustments to your your raw pictures whether it's in a sea out which is Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom then check that video out but I'm just gonna rush straight ahead and open these images up in Photoshop so we can concentrate on what today's video is which is about removing the sky or swapping the sky okay so first of all I'm gonna grab the sky and I'm gonna overlap it onto the picture but I'm going to use as the sea so let's just double click this one just so I know where I am call that the sky on the background one there we're simply going to call that the sea so now we know exactly where we are so if I turn that on and off you can simply see that's the one we're going to use for the sky and the bottom one is the one we're going to use for the sea with the long exposure okay so the first thing I need to do now then is highlight both of these you simply do that by clicking on one layer pressing and holding the control button which adds or removes to your selection by clicking your mouse button so if I click the bottom layer that's now added both layers I'm now gonna come up into edit and auto align layers click on that just leave it on auto everything will be perfectly fine and there you go so now that's the images in theory aligned sometimes you might have to find two nests but if I just switch the top layer on and off you can see that's done a fairly decent job okay so I quite like that okay so all I'm gonna do now then is click on the top layer which is the sky and I'm going to simply grab my selection tool my polygon lasso tool I'm gonna make sure I'm right on that horizon make sure you right on that horizon now you can zoom in of course and take your time and get this absolutely spot-on and I'm just gonna follow that horizon all the way along all the way along to there down down down there you go like so and I'm gonna click on layer mask I'm just going to give it a vector mask what's actually happening now is I'll remove the sky so in essence it's the wrong way around so all I'm going to do with my layer mask selected is simply invert it once I've inverted it that what I'll actually do now it'll actually cut the sea out and not cut the Scout so it's very very simple and secured it'll tip that by the way every time you press control and I wherever color you're on it'll automatically take you to the opposite color now as you know or probably no layer masks work with black and white so if you simply want to invert white it turns to black and so on and so forth so it's that easy so now instantly you can see a path from fine-tuning that's all I need to do now I can zoom in here and have a look and all that looks perfectly fine all that looks perfectly fine okay and the only time it gets a little bit odd is around about here and all I'm going to do here obviously still selected my layer mask hit B for brush let's select a fairly large brush let's make sure it's a very soft brush I'm going to come up to my opacity I'm going to click on let's say 40% and I'm just simply going to paint it I'll just blend that in just blend it in there you go think really really easy I don't need to do anything any more than that and that in essence is the sky swapped over or the sea swapped over didn't really matter us 5050 pretty much in this instance now the reason why I've chosen this image because in the sky it's the fastest shutter speed and with the fastest shutter speed the wheel that was revolving it's pretty much frozen the wheel the image underneath has that lovely slow shutter speed where the where the wheel is actually is moving in the frame and it looks it looks so much nicer so all I'm now going to do is actually use the blurry part of the wheel and add it also into the sky so this is why I chose this image and all I'm going to do for this is in exactly the same way I'm going to make sure black is selected could it's the opposite but this time I'm going to choose a large brush I'm going to make sure it's a hard brush now the shortcuts for that by the way is my square brackets on the keyboard so a square brackets to the right will make the brush bigger square brackets to the left will make the brush smaller and if you hold your shift button down the same two square brackets will make it harder or softer so in this instance working on the fly I'm going to choose a large brush and I'm going to choose a hard brush and I'm gonna try and the best I can click make sure I want a hundred percent let's go right up to the edge of that wheel there you go that looks a lot better yeah lots of times it's tried an error that's good okay now if you look at these messy parts here these messy parts are where the image didn't quite line up or it's from a messy part of the sky again that's not really a problem same as here as well you can see on the edge here so first of all let's go back to just tidying this up and I am rushing so you could take your time when you do it but as you can see even rushing we do a pretty decent job okay so now all I'm going to do here just to tidy these small bits up here is I'm gonna select my clone stamp and I'm just going to go around the edge there and just make that nice and neat nothing any more complicated than that okay so before I do that I now need a new layer and what I do if I want a new layer because the top layer at the moment if I simply press ctrl + J or duplicated that layer all I'm going to do is actually duplicate whatever effect I had on the top layer so this is only how I work how I do it is I use the shortcut ctrl alt shift and E and what ctrl alt shift + E does it creates me a fresh layer it's almost like a snapshot of where I am it's almost like merge visible but of course it keeps the history so the two layers underneath intact so there you go so now I've got a fresh layer I can simply press s or come across to this icon here which is my clone stamp and all I'm going to do is hold down alt select the area close by okay and I'm just gonna tidy this up titoo this up and you can really take your time with this remember at this present moment in time I'm really really zoomed in make someone a hundred percent there as well when you work with the clone stamp my suggestion to you is always working lines so you can see you've got a line coming across here so just follow that line all the way in come all the way up there's a few bits there don't really need to do that but certainly these bits here so let's grab that there come across and get that bit bigger so I can rush it all the way up around there follow that round really really take your time I can really get in here nice and simple I'll probably speed that up just a little bit more in the Edit so just not so boring okay there you go now like I said you could take your time with that and get that absolutely spot-on get down to some real fine detail and I'm gonna grab my patch tool just go across these areas here drag it across and that'll just balance that light out just a bit more and make it look a lot more natural and there you go and that's selected there so make sure you press ctrl + D to deselect it ctrl + 0 is called fullscreen so you can see we were really titillating that image so in this particular image now what we've got is we've got the long exposure see the fast expose your sky but I've also included the long exposure wheel that goes into the sky as well so this is a little bit more complicated than an ordinary picture but with an ordinary picture like the first one I showed you earlier this one here this is quite literally grabbing the first shot which is the sea grabbing the sky on there and drawing a line across the horizon and in dividing one to the other and then just simply clean it up using a layer mask and of course just to finish that image off there once again I'm gonna press ctrl alt shift + E to flatten the layer on top keeping the history intact again don't comment because there's lots of ways of actually doing this lots of ways of working in terms of a workflow within Photoshop this is just the way I've always done it so with that top layer selected I'm going to press ctrl + T I'm going to hold down shift + alt and that maintains the ratio I'm simply gonna open that picture up hit enter and voila so I can clean spots up I can do whatever I want with that image but there you go that's it it's as simple as that what we're looking at now is like I say is a long exposure shot with a/c and a fast exposure shot with the sky it's not - everybody's like in and sometimes even I don't like you but more often or not I do but there you go that concludes this video on how I swap my skies over hopefully you guys have enjoyed that if you have give me a thumbs up and subscribing all the rest of it [Music]

Channel: Gary Gough (Pro Photographer)

Views: 38,735

Rating: 4.8909321 out of 5

Keywords: Landscape Photography High ISO, Seascapes, Seascape Photography, landscape photography, landscape photography tutorial, landscape photography tips, landscapes, Photography, landscape photography canon, landscape photography filters, landscape photography settings, video, outdoor photography, gary gough, tips, lessons, tutorials, st monans, st monans pier, black and white photography, black and white landscapes, Photoshop Tutorial, Photoshop, Landscape

Id: wjEWJJWa_fk

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 09 2018