Exposure Blending in Photoshop

In this video we're going to be talking about the benefits of exposure blending in Photoshop. So in a lot of my videos I'm constantly talking about bracketing my shots so I can blend in darker exposures for the sky and focus stacking and stuff and I kind of figured it was probably time to show you guys what I do when I do some of that stuff. Now I'm not going to get deeply into the luminosity mask part of things because, well, that's kind of premium content. If you want to learn more about that you can go over to my website nickpagephotography.com and sign up for a Skype session there and I'll teach you all about it. But in this video I want to talk about exposure blending and show you guys why it's better than just bringing down the highlights and boosting the shadows inside of Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. So let's jump over to the computer and I'll show you what I'm talking about. Oftentimes my workflow starts inside of Lightroom and I'll get a series of photos and I will basically do just some basic raw adjustments and then I'll open them up inside of Photoshop. This Thor's Well shot for example here I've already got open over here inside of Photoshop. I've got my dark frame and I've got my bright frame. What's nice about blending exposures is you can treat your sky file a little bit differently than you do your foreground. For example you can add a little extra contrast, maybe a little extra saturation. One of the things I like to do is take away some of the sharpening because that's only going to amplify noise in your sky and then you can do a little bit of noise reduction and get a slightly smoother sky and then you can do something different with your foreground as well. A lot of times I will boost my shadows, boost my blacks, that way I can have a darker foreground but still not lose detail in the darker parts of my shot. So in these files that's pretty much exactly what I've done. I've boosted the blacks just a little bit, boosted the shadows just a little bit in this brighter frame because this lava rock is so dark and then in my sky file here, slightly different white balance and added a little bit more contrast. In some photos exposure blending is incredibly easy. When you get a flat horizon like this it is really easy. You could do it in the field with just a graduated neutral density filter. Oftentimes I think that it's so easy to do it digitally I would rather do it after the fact and then have full control. So let me show you what I would do. So I have this dark frame here. All I need to do is create a new layer mask. Then I'm going to invert that layer mask by going control I. That way I'm starting off with a clean slate. Black means that none of this layer is showing up and then anywhere that I paint white on this is going to start to reveal that file. So I'm going to go up to my paintbrush at 100% opacity. I have a zero hardness that way it's feathered on the edges and then as I paint this in it's just going to bring in that darker sky. As I paint this back and forth you can see that the feathering on the bottom helps to smoothly transition into that brighter foreground. Now we're starting off with a sky that is probably a little bit too dark. Hide my layer mask. You can see that's a huge huge exposure difference between my sky and my foreground. The reason I did that is I wanted to try to get the highlights in that brightest part of the sky. So one of the things that I can kind of make this blend go a little bit smoother by doing is just to create a new either brightness contrast or levels adjustment. And then if I hold down alt and click on the line between my levels and my darker sky it's going to clip it to just that sky file. So now when I make an adjustment on here it's only going to affect whatever is directly below. So now I just want to brighten up the shadows just a little bit. Something like that. And that way it's going to not let the shadows in our sky get over dark. Because the goal here is to blend this convincingly and seamlessly. And so you want to end up with a fairly bright sky and a fairly dark foreground. That way it gives you a nice starting point that is realistic. Realistic is the key because the whole point of this is to end up with a realistic result. And that's one of the things that you lose in an HDR or even in Lightroom's HDR is that by boosting your shadows and bringing down the highlights you get a very flat result. But as you can see here once I finish blending this in we end up with a very natural looking result. At this point I could move on and edit this shot just as if this is the starting point. We have the entire dynamic range and we have this nice sky with all of our highlight information and we didn't have to flatten our foreground. And what I mean by flatten is if you bring down the highlights and boost the shadows let me just show you exactly what that would look like. So let's hide these two layers here and we'll duplicate this foreground layer and if I open up filter Adobe Camera Raw this is basically going to be just like the Lightroom engine. So if I bring down my highlights and boost my shadows we sure we gain a whole lot of information in here but it's a very flat very muddy frankly a very yucky result. Plus we still don't have information in the brightest part of our sky because we weren't able to get it all in one shot. You can see we did gain some information here but we could have done that just by using an adjustment layer with our more natural looking foreground. But this this foreground is far busier than this foreground. The water in this shot acts as eye magnets basically where the eye is going to follow the water but this foreground there's just detail everywhere and because there's detail everywhere the eye will wander and it just doesn't have much direction. But when you compare this to this I feel like this maybe our sky is a little bit over dark but it's a much better starting place than this. Okay so I have this shot here which is both focused stacked which I've already done and then we have this incredibly dark foreground and incredibly bright sky. I took some darker shots here and this is going to be another fairly simple one because we have such a flat level horizon line. So all I have to do again is I have my darker frame on top create a new new layer mask invert it and then with a white paintbrush I can just start to reveal that. And you can see that I did do a little bit of a slightly different white balance color treatment in the HSL panel basically I wanted a little bit more magenta and a little bit more warmy orange tones in our sky which wouldn't have necessarily good and looked good in the foreground because we have all these greens and I didn't want to lose the greens in our foreground. So as I paint this in you can see I just did this by hand no luminosity masks needed really yet except we do have some blown out highlights here and let me show you where the benefit of using luminosity masks come in because I don't want to use a darker sky than this because it would not look natural. But I want to try to retain some of these highlights here. So what I can do is I have this darker frame here which I wish the clouds weren't moving quite so fast because there is going to be a little bit of ghosting there. We do have a little bit more highlight detail I even blew out the highlights in this darker one but I was in a hurry and I didn't do a good job but it's probably why I have never posted the shot anyways what I'm going to do is I'm first I'm going to hide this so a quick tip if you want to create a new layer mask but create it filled with black just hold down alt when you click on create new layer mask and it fills it with black a little time saver there and now we need to jump over to using luminosity masks. I have all of the different luminosity mask creation tools I've got Lumensia here I've got TK Actions 5 and I've also got Instamask from Jimmy McIntyre. They're all really strong programs I'm going to do a video about that here coming up soon for now I'm just going to use Lumensia. What I need to do is I need to create a luminosity mask that's going to target these brightest tones without letting me paint into the slightly darker highlights up here. So luminosity masks are really good at creating masks based on luminosity. So if I select this one anything that's white is I'm going to be able to paint in some of our darker exposure anything that's black it's going to not let me it's basically I'm going to be using this like a stencil. So if I go back to levels 2 or lights 2 it's going to let me paint into the brighter parts a little too much but lights 3 I think is going to be restrictive enough to where it's going to do a good job only letting me paint into those clouds I might even further refine it by going into the color portion of it and selecting less of the blues. So now with this selected I'm going to select it here go up to our black layer mask I'm going to hit control H to hide our marching ants so I can see what I'm doing and now I'm just going to zoom in here and slowly start to paint in some of our blown out highlights here. So as I paint in here you can see some of these highlights are going to come back. The bad part of this is that the clouds are moving fast I didn't take my exposures close enough together so I'm going to have a little bit of weirdness if I bring in this bring this in too much but still going to be better than it was. You want to be careful not to bring it in too much and create a really flat result in your sky because skies look best when they're contrasty and I still got a lot of blown out highlights but a little bit of Orton effect or Gaussian blur will kind of muddy that together enough to where it won't be too bad but you can see how much detail we're able to bring back using luminosity mass there there is a little bit of ghosting and stuff which is unfortunate but that's operator error more than anything and then at this point again I would treat it like my starting place it really wasn't that hard hardest part was the fact that we have all those bright highlights up in our sky but still it's a much better result than if we were to start back duplicate this layer and then open up Adobe camera raw and show you what it would look like if I brought down the highlights boosted shadow so bring down the highlights boost the shadows and I'm sure that you guys have seen photos like this all over Facebook or all over social media because this is what people do a lot of times they take their landscape shot maybe they'll run it through the HDR feature in Lightroom and then they'll bring down the highlights boost the shadows and look at this foreground like granted like there's a lot of color and a lot of detail there but in my opinion is way too much this is much more of a natural foreground because we have highlights hitting the brightest parts of our vegetation and the flowers but the eye isn't drawn into all those deep shadows when we do this though the eye is just like whoa I the I just wants to go everywhere and that's not a good thing you want to create photos that are simple and easy to easy for the eye to process and when you do this it just creates detail everywhere and the eye doesn't know where to go you can still bring out some of the highlights and shadows in our more natural result just by going up here creating a dodge burn layer and then just painting some nice highlights into the darker parts of the photo if I have a nice low opacity and I can emphasize some of our foreground here just by doing this dodge burn layer that before and after it's much more subtle it's more much more natural looking and now the eye has a particular path to travel as opposed to this where the eye doesn't have a path it just wants to look everywhere I much prefer this result and then of course we can stylize a little bit more if we want to so another thing that you can do with exposure blending is you can do something called dual raw dual processing a raw file so I have this shot here where you have a rainbow there but there's the sky is so bright that you're losing all that cool contrast and stuff that should be happening there if I was to add a bunch of contrast bring down the exposure by the time we do this our foreground is just all blocked up and nasty so what we can do is we can dual process this I'll create a virtual copy one version will be for my sky so I want to add a little magenta add a whole bunch of contrast bring down the exposure a lot add some contrast in the highlights by boosting our whites bringing down our highlights maybe I'll even darken the top part of the sky bring down the exposure a bit with a gradient filter and then maybe I'll even add a little bit of clarity to our sky to create more texture going on up in here so the by the time we've done this we've ruined our foreground but now what we can do is we can go over to our virtual copy bring down the exposure a little bit tweak our white balance decrease contrast that way we can have a nice dark foreground but still maintain all of our detail we can keep an eye on our histogram here make sure we don't go too dark with it and then this will be really simple we'll just open it up as layers in Photoshop I have them both selected right-click edit in open as layers in Photoshop and that's going to open the photos up one on top of the other in one file inside of Photoshop that gives us this we have our contrasty sky on top our less contrasty foreground on the bottom I'll hold down alt create a new layer mask and then with a white paintbrush just paint in at a higher opacity paint in our contrasty sky and again this is an easy one because our foreground is pretty flat when you really run into needing luminosity mass that's when you have like a mountain or you have trees breaking your horizon line but on a shot like this it's really pretty simple if you end up with spots like this they're a little bit too dark we can just switch back over to black and add a lower opacity and just bring in some of that less contrasty sky anywhere where our contrast got away from us places like that and then boom and then I can treat this like my starting point for doing all of the processing that I would normally do to a photo okay so let's go over to this photo here this shot is interesting because it's not only a high dynamic range scene that I needed to bracket my shots for but it's also a panorama so the way I shot that was I would set up for a panorama I would do three shots bracketed shots vertically pan a little bit three bracketed shots and I would do that all the way across then when I got back into Lightroom I would take each set of three and merge those into a HDR shot inside of Lightroom and then I would take all of those DNG files that that Lightroom spits out and I would merge all of those into a panorama and the result is this file here which you can see by the name it's HDR and it's a panorama so I have if I zoom in to our highlights here if I bring down the exposure we have all of our highlight detail in that beautiful sky but if I boost the exposure a little bit we also have nice clean shadows in all of our shadow areas as well there's no noise there so we have the full dynamic range and we have a panorama so that's pretty cool so I can treat this like we did the last one where I'm going to dual process it I'm going to edit once for the sky once for our foreground let me show you how I would do that so we need all of our sky here maybe I'll bring down the highlights increase contrast and really the most important thing is going to be not overexposing our highlights there something like this because this is only going to affect our sky I can be as creative as I want with our white balance so try to find a white balance that I like and then I can remove sharpening add a little noise reduction and the most important thing is to remove chromatic aberrations because this is going to be one where chromatic aberrations are going to be likely now I'm going to create a virtual copy of it I'm going to undo all those contrast adjustments boost my shadows do something like this and basically in this file I'm opening up the shadows but I'm not opening them up so much that it's going to look fake and cartoony I want to add a little bit of highlight pop so that's why I brought up the whites but I'm not going to boost the exposure way up like this that would just it would make for a difficult blend because the sky and the foreground are such different exposures that it's not going to look right and it's just not going to look very good in the end also I'm going to cool down the exposure or the white balance just a little bit remove noise reduction do a little sharpening now I'm going to open up these two layers edit in open as layers in Photoshop okay so now we have our darker sky on top of our brighter foreground I'm going to use a combination of hand painting and luminosity mass to blend in this darker sky okay so now when I turn this darker frame off and on you can see that we've only affected our sky without blending into our shadows and we've maintained both contrast and detail in the darker areas of our image without going flat by boosting our shadows and bringing down our highlights if we go back to Lightroom and we do exactly that we'll reset we'll boost our shadows bring down our highlights this is kind of shot that you would see a lot of people do but I just don't love how gross it looks it just looks gross it doesn't look natural it looks very very HDR but if we exposure blend and blend in a darker sky with our brighter foreground we come away with much more natural result now at this point I would go through I would edit the photo as I normally would and I can add all of my stylization that I want to but we were starting from a much more natural looking result and that's going to lead to a much more natural looking finished photo alright thank you guys so much hopefully that you found this useful remember if you want to learn more about using luminosity masks you can go over to my website and get signed up for a Skype session there or you can go to improve photography plus calm and I've got videos there as well I'm gonna finish editing this photo enjoy and thank you guys so much make sure you like and subscribe we'll see in the next video