Digital blending multiple exposures
I received a request on Flickr a couple days ago:
you mentioned taking 3 exposures in one of your shots (a stream in big basin) and combining them together in photoshop. how do you do that?
I can only assume he meant this one:
Big Basin State Park, Santa Cruz Mountains, California
Nikon D70, Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G
Vari-ND filter, Gitzo 1228LVL tripod, RRS BH-55 ballhead
(3 exposures at 1/4″, 1.3″ and 3″) @ f/16, iso 200, 12mm (18mm)
Here’s how I did it.
Well before I tell you how, I think I should mention how I’m going to tell you how. I am going to use the excellent program Comic Life to do it. You can see from Flickr that this is a pretty amazing program that people have used in interesting ways.
If you don’t have a Mac, then you can try this shameless copy of the program for Windows. It’s not as good since it doesn’t take advantage of the cool features built into the latest Mac OS X. (But then again, neither did I.)
The idea as a tutorial, I shamelessly stole from Dave McNally.
Click on the images and then “All Sizes” to read the tutorial.
June 25th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
John Koontz links this article. Wow!
He has a reference to another tutorial which uses the magic wand to specifically select/generate the layer mask. Very cool.
June 28th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
An article on DPBlogs reminded me that I should link Erik Krause’s seminal article (and free Photoshop actions) for doing this style of contrast blending.
I use the contrast blending technique in my article (for the waterblur highlights in the middle exposure), but as I mentioned earlier, I prefer brush style digital blending to avoid the plastic look of HDR.
My style is less “HDR” and more “zone system.” Applications like LightZone apply the same principle and semi-automate the process. If it worked for >16 bit images you’d have the ultimate digital blending system.
July 6th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
Another article on digital blending. Also I recommend looking at Peter Bowers’s photo stream for some great examples of using digital blending.
December 6th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
[...] Instead of this, I do this in postprocessing. In the Golden Gate Bridge, I took three exposures and then blended between them in the manner I explained earlier. In the case of the Yosemite Falls photo at the top of the page, I just used a 16 bit image and artificially added back in the color of the sky with a blue gradient mask. [...]
February 24th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
[...] practical example is if you are taking a bracketed shot for work in HDR or contrast blending. The most noise free data will be in the highlights of your shots and therefore those are the bits [...]
June 30th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
[...] with blending multiple exposures for a writeup. Good for me and my schedule The Woodwork already did it. I’m still planning on playing around with this technique and I’ll eventually [...]