tutorial: digital blending

Andy

ok guys, step by step. i've put this together in suppor of digital darkroom assignment 13

and as always, if anyone has better technique, please feel free to add to this, bitch-slap me, or what ever :lol3 i'm just presenting what works for me.

btw -the exact same concepts here work for bracketed jpgs.

so, here's my original image, brought into photoshop from my raw converter. it's the in-camera exposure:


now save this as a tiff or psd (your preference) and then re-open the raw file (or your second jpg exposure if you were shooting bracketed jpgs).

here's what i'll do for my second exposure. only pay attention to the dark parts that you are trying to raise the exposure for. here, in this image, it's most everything except the car itself. you'll want to be careful here, raising the exposure by 2 stops doesn't always work well, sometimes it will introduce too much noise and / or hinky artifacts etc. so be careful out there, kids. i had no trouble doing 2 stops here, becuase this shot was done at iso 800, i didn't care about the noise.


so now, once this file converts into photoshop, select all, copy and then paste it right on top of your psd or tiff that you saved of the base exposure. you'll end up with something like this:


now, we're going to use the layer mask to remove the effect of the 2nd exposure from the car. choose a fat, soft-edged brush, make sure black is your foreground color, opacity at 100% and start painting away. when done, you can always undo portions of what you just masked away, simply by switching to the eraser, fat soft brush, vary the opacity (up to 100% if needed) and erase away...


and here's a little animation showing the difference between the before and after:


and, here's the final pic:


i hope this helps, and as always, please post your questions here.

enjoy (digital blending) photography,

Sam

andy wrote:

ok guys, step by step. i've put this together in suppor of digital darkroom assignment 13

and as always, if anyone has better technique, please feel free to add to this, bitch-slap me, or what ever i'm just presenting what works for me.


Thanks Andy,

I have started to print out some of these tips and have them in a 3 ring binder for reference. I'll give this a try.

Sam

dkapp

Thanks for another great tutorial. I need to use this technique in some of my shots, but never had the time to research steps and play around.

I this this one belongs in "The Hall of Wisdom" with your other tutorials.

Dave

gubbs

Thanks andy, really good stuff,

What do you all use to do the screen snaps with??

Andy

dkapp wrote:

Thanks for another great tutorial. I need to use this technique in some of my shots, but never had the time to research steps and play around.

I this this one belongs in "The Hall of Wisdom" with your other tutorials.

Dave

thanks dave

Andy

snagit

gubbs wrote:

Thanks andy, really good stuff,

What do you all use to do the screen snaps with??

i've been using snagit you can find it here forever.

works great