Can someone please do a layer tutorial for me please on

gus

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gus

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cletus

Humungus wrote:

How to use layers in CS2...yep i have no idea. Such as in the case of bracketing & layer the shot to get a dark sky over a bright one.

Tks

A long, long time ago, Andy did a nice tutorial for CS. It's an indoor shot of a car, but the basic idea is the same.

CS2 may have some newer features, but the CS methods still work.

Shay Stephens

Assuming you have the layers pallet visible. Copy your image and then paste it. You will see the original image in the layer pallet stack and the new pasted image above the original.

Now look at the top of the pallet and find the blending drop down. Set it to multiply or overlay (whichever works better for you). Now set the opacity of the top layer to something that looks good to you.

Now at this point you probably have a dark image. You want the top to be dark and the bottom to be untouched. So at the bottom of the pallet, click on the "Add a mask" button. Then change to the gradient tool with a black to transparent gradient. Click and drag from the horizon to the top of the image and you should get a darkened sky with an untouched ground. If not do a control I to invert the mask.

To use raw, instead of copying and pasting the original, just create two versions of the image, one for the ground and one darker image for the sky. Copy the sky image and paste it to the ground image and do the rest noted above.

Humungus wrote:

How to use layers in CS2...yep i have no idea. Such as in the case of bracketing & layer the shot to get a dark sky over a bright one.

Tks

NHBubba

Shay Stephens wrote:

Then change to the gradient tool with a black to transparent gradient. Click and drag from the horizon to the top of the image and you should get a darkened sky with an untouched ground.

I do this myself w/ landscapes. I think it's a cheap, fake-out alternative to graduated ND filters.

Sometimes you can get the two images to blend from a single RAW. Other times it helps to have bracketed two shots (and have had not much move).

Some alternative methods for building the layer mask are outlined in this Luminous Landscapes tut. Andy's method sounds to me like their 'Painted Mask' technique. Another option is their 'Layer Mask' technique where you actually use the light layer converted to gray-scale for the mask on the dark layer. I find that works well w/ complex foreground objects (like trees) but looks funky w/ simple landscapes. I find the gradient method Shay mentions works best for simple landscapes.

gus

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Sam

Gus,

Click on the link and look for digital blending. This will give you step by step instructions.

The Luminous Landscape

Sam

ps: There's enough other stuff here to keep you in reading material for a long time.