Merging the two photo's

Graham00

Graham00

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Graham Mc
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I'm taking an exposure of the sky rendering the land dark and exposing the land making the sky have blown highlights then trying to merge the two.
I did this quite sucessfully in GIMP but now have PSE 8, does anyone have a quick way instead of layering, erasing and leaving bits of sky inbetween trees and leaving a horrible visible black line ?
 
There is a way to paint with light to bring out the shadows I found in a Russell brown tutorial. Else you could try a layer mask with a gradient.
 
There is a nice way to do what you want without using HDR soft. This is the good news: the bad news is that you can't try this method in Elements because you can't add a layer mask to a regular image layer (this is an important flaw in Elements).

Anyway, for those who have the regular photoshop, here is the link to download this short tutorial (PDF, extracted from Photoshop User Magazine, jan/feb 2009 issue):
http://hotfile.com/dl/53698268/af542d4/HDR.pdf.html

It works great and of course, the best is to have 2 different exposures of the same image made with the camera on a tripod (take care to use the same f/stop for the 2 images).
 
How did you do it with GIMP? That's the program I'm using--and I'm still trying to get used to it!
 
Broto said:
There is a nice way to do what you want without using HDR soft. This is the good news: the bad news is that you can't try this method in Elements because you can't add a layer mask to a regular image layer (this is an important flaw in Elements).
Click to expand...

Graham, don't spend a extra £500 on Photoshop CS just to get layer masks ,just download this free layer mask add on for Elements.;)

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pselements/qt/layermasktool.htm
 
Just went out on the front garden and shot these, and combined them in Elements 7, is this what you had in mind?

126392205.jpg


126392203.jpg


Combined
126392201.jpg
 
CoughlinPhotog. said:
How did you do it with GIMP? That's the program I'm using--and I'm still trying to get used to it!
Click to expand...

I opened one photo, then opened the other (copy, paste into) then used the eraser tool carefully to bring the underneath layer through, it's very time consuming and not very easy especially if there's many trees on the horizon.
 
Graham00 said:
I opened one photo, then opened the other (copy, paste into) then used the eraser tool carefully to bring the underneath layer through, it's very time consuming and not very easy especially if there's many trees on the horizon.
Click to expand...

The above example took less than 5 minutes and needed no time consuming erasing around the tree leaves.;)

A 100% crop, any ghosting is a result of both exposures being hand held and not exactly aligning and not the technique.:)

126393015.jpg
 
That's pretty damn good hand held, all i need to do is how to use the tool for the job.
I take it this needs to be done in jpeg after you've tweaked both RAW ?
 
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