Shutterevolve – The Art of Digital Blending: The Ultimate Guide to Luminosity Masks and Exposure Ble

Luminosity masks, as you may already know, are an extremely powerful way of blending exposures to create balanced images. They give us complete control over our workflow, and allow us to really push our creativity, without the need for HDR software.

Hello JimmyI run a French version of Photoshop CC 2014 and I had no problem to execute your actions. The masks are created properly. I also purchased the tutorial on digital blending and am working on it, not so easy.Best regards

Shutterevolve – The Art of Digital Blending

DOWNLOAD

You will learn to blend exposures quickly, naturally and cleanly with some of the most difficult scenes around. From instant digital blending to luminosity masking, simple landscapes to complex interior shots, you will see how easily we can blend any exposures using Lumi32.

We will take the processing beyond exposure blending and learn how to deepen the mood in our images, how to enhance a sunset, create a dreamy, magical feel, handle colours with maximum effect, prepare images in Adobe Camera RAW or Lightroom, and many other techniques that will give your images that professional finish.

Using Darks 2 again, I blended the -4 exposure into the 0 exposure to show you how unnatural the blending would look. Essentially, the sign is fine, but the glow around the sign has now become a dark halo. The glow around the sign on the 0 exposure is very strong, while it is almost non-existent on the -4 exposure. That is why combining these two exposures is far more challenging.

The reason for doing this is because you are blending the darker exposure into your brighter exposure. So your brighter exposure is acting as the base exposure. The base exposure is your main image which contains most of the image information. You always want your base exposure at the bottom.

Whenever you want to blend a darker exposure into a base (lighter) exposure, it is wise to make the darker exposure invisible before the actual exposure blending process. Explaining why you want to do this goes into slightly more advanced notions of exposure blending, nevertheless, it is important to know.

The method of exposure blending that you are about to use is called Apply Image. In this technique, Photoshop will read the image you see on the big screen in front of you, which should be your base exposure (because the dark exposure is invisible), it will translate that image into greyscale, and then apply it to the mask that you created on the darker exposure.

However, this is very important to remember, when exposure blending, you do not want a mask that has too much contrast. You want the blend between the exposures to be smooth and natural. So if you are unsure, try to go for a slightly less contrasty/restrictive mask. But feel free to play around with it. Make your mask more and more targeted and see how it affects your image.

The final step in this basic tutorial is to lower the opacity of the darker exposure. If you are blending a dark sky from a darker exposure, for example, into a normally exposed image, it might look strange. The sky should usually be brighter during the day than foreground elements. In order to make the blend more natural, you may need to select the darker exposure layer, and just bring the opacity of that layer down until it looks natural.

Named as one of the top photographers on 500px.com by Fstoppers.com, and Followed by more than 250,000 photographers, Jimmy McIntyre is a travel photographer and educator. Jimmy has had the incredible pleasure of shooting amazing spots all over the world and teaching photography on 4 different continents. He is also the creator of Raya Pro, a famous exposure blending panel for Photoshop used by thousands of photographers. 2ff7e9595c