The EASIEST way to exposure blend in Photoshop

[Music] okay let's look at a very easy simple yet effective way of blending two exposures so this is the photo we're going to use this is taken at the pinnacles on philip island and what we have going on here is a the sun is sitting behind the pinnacles so what this does it creates a very bright sky and a very dark foreground so a good option here is to take two exposures what we do is we take one exposure for our foreground to try and keep our noise under control and retain as much detail as possible in the shadow areas and then we take another exposure for our sky again to keep our highlights under control and just to get as much detail as possible in the lighter areas so with our one exposure we can reduce our highlights and increase our shadows a little just to try and bring out some of that detail but then the problem is because of the extreme case of the bright sky and the dark foreground we start to introduce a bit of noise the more we increase our shadows the more we try and bring up these darker areas the more chance we have of bringing in noise so a good option is the two exposures keep our noise under control keep our highlights under control and then blend them together in photoshop so what i do is i do two edits i do one edit for our foreground exposure and then i do one edit for our background or our sky exposure and then i will bring them into photoshop okay so now we've adjusted our two exposures we have our foreground exposure and our sky exposure now open in photoshop so we've just opened them as two separate photos at this stage so now we will begin with the blending process so first thing i like to do is drag my lighter exposure on top of the darker and just create two layers so the easiest way to do this is if we grab our move tool and we just click on our lighter exposure just drag it down a little this opens it in its own separate window from there if we just click on the actual image drag it up and it should place it on top of our background or our sky exposure so with the move tool still selected just grab your lighter exposure and you can just move it around okay so these were taken on a tripod so we know that our two exposures are aligned so good idea if you're going to do this make sure you are using a tripod otherwise you will need to align your two images before you start the blending process so with our two exposures stacked on top of each other we've got a lighter exposure on top and the darker underneath once we've done this what we do is we want to create a layer mask on our brighter exposure so with the brighter exposure selected we go to layer mask add a layer mask you should see a little white box appear once this white box appear we want to actually click on the thumbnail of the brighter exposure so click on the thumbnail next to the mask from there we go to channels select channels now once you're on your channels panel what we want to do is hold down control on the keyboard once we're holding control select rgb okay now you should see some marching ants appear so what this has done is essentially it's created a luminosity mask and it's going to mask out all the brighter areas of the image okay so now we go back to our layers we should still have marching ants on screen so now we select our layer mask okay with our layer mask selected we go over to our brush tool grab your brush tool just make sure that you've got a black brush so you can either alternate with the arrow keys or x on the keyboard x on the keyboard will alternate between black and white brushes so with our black brush selected all we do make sure that we're still on our layer mask and we start painting out the sky and that is how easy it is to blend two photos or two exposures together now because this is a luminosity mask the more we paint the more it will reveal okay so we keep painting paint away and that will completely get rid of the top exposure so this is basically painting out this white sky in our overexposed or our foreground and we just keep painting around the edges now the more you paint the more you will start to reveal the bottom exposure so just be careful that we kind of stay as close to the edges as possible and as you can see that is probably the easiest yet most effective way of blending two images together or blending two exposures together in photoshop so this is just a general starting point with luminosity masks so my goal is to keep things very simple really aimed at people just starting to get their head around photoshop and trying to make things as easy as possible yet still very effective so as you can see we now have our sky and there's the original foreground and we've just brought back all that detail in the foreground so from there if we wanted to go one step further what we can do is we can actually flatten this image flatten that photo and then if we reopen our over exposed this one or our foreground okay we'll just open that again so basically we can repeat the process click and drag get our brighter exposure on the top create a layer mask channels control rgb back to layers grab our brush tool and repeat the process and each time we paint it out we will start to get a better blend between the sky and the foreground because our now our underexposed or our sky image isn't as dark as the original image we were working with so now there are better ways of doing luminosity masks if you're just starting out with photoshop luminosity mask can get pretty confusing first you've got to create your luminosity mask or you can download patches but this is a good way to get started and as you can see we've just slightly brightened the foreground a little bit more so a good way to start with luminosity masks and blending so there you go um nice easy simple yet still effective way of blending two exposures together so i hope you did like this hopefully hopefully you found it useful if you did please leave a like if there's anything you'd like to see made easy that's what i'm going to try and do here try and take some more complex photoshop tutorials and try and make them as simple and as easy to follow as possible so if there's anything you'd like to see please leave a comment below and hopefully i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Photos on the Bay

Views: 3,314

Rating: 4.8626609 out of 5

Keywords: exposure, blend, photoshop, luminosity, mask, replace, sky, easy, simple, easiest, way

Id: hLt25L8ERJo

Length: 7min 54sec (474 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021