Austin sunset (two images merged together)

I wanted to try a test of this technique I've used before with the moon, but never with a whole landscape. Basically, I take two shots from a tripod, one exposed for the sky and clouds (but makes the terrain too dark) and the other exposed for the terrain (but with a too bright sky). Then I merge them together with Photoshop. This is just a way to work around the limited color sensitivity of digital cameras.

And I was fortunate to have a good night with decent clouds and almost no wind (though we were pestered by a persistent horse fly).

And here's the result:

what fun it is. I am going to have to try this.

How do you do that in Photoshop? I could really use a cool tool like that!

btw, I've always wanted to visit Austin, but that was for the music scene. This makes me want to visit for the scenery. Who knew Austin has a river, for instance?
:shrug:

The first thing to do is take the photos.

-- Use a tripod. Take one photo exposed for the sky. I did this by checking the histogram and making sure that the graph was not off the right edge. The terrain will be too dark, but that's okay.

-- Take another picture exposed for the terrain. In this case I made sure the histogram graph was not off the left edge. The sky will be very bright. BTW, I just used the exposure compensation to make exposure adjustments.

-- It also helps to use RAW for these, as you can further alter the exposure pretty dramatically without any loss of quality. And, of course, I actually took several pictures at each exposure, just for insurance.


Now, in Photoshop:

-- Open the image for the sky. This will be the background.

-- Open the image for the terrain. Select the entire image (ctrl-A) and copy. Close that window. Now, looking at the window with the sky image, do a paste. This will create Layer 1 with the terrain image.

-- Now we do the blending, using the layer mask. Make sure Layer 1 is selected, then do "Add Layer Mask". The adds an all-white mask, which means it shows only layer 1 (the terrain).

-- Now we want the sky from the background layer to show through. Select the brush, make it black. Click on the white mask of layer 1, which tells Photoshop you want to draw on the mask (not the image). Now start painting over the sky. As you do, it will reveal the correctly exposed sky from the background layer.

I did the mask painting manually. It was tedious, and I wasn't completely happy with the results. The line where the sky and terrain meet is the problem. There's probably a much better way to do it.

-- Once you've finished with the mask, the blending is done. After that I did level adjustments on each layer separately (using the "Group layer with previous" command). Then I flattened and sharpened and saved the jpeg.


The other difficult thing, for me, was deciding how bright to make each image. Since the photos were taken while it was getting dark, I left the terrain a little dim (to keep it "real"), but now I'm thinking maybe it should be brighter. I'm not sure.

BTW, this was taken with the Sigma 10-20mm lens, at 10mm. Love the wide angle!!

This blending thing is something I've been wanting to learn how to do, too, but I'm not quite sure how to convert all this PhotoShop talk to PaintShop Pro X. Probably not too hard, I'd guess.

I even think I understand most of it. :think: I've often wondered about that layer mask thing, the help function has never properly explained it to me. You've explained it's function and process very well. When I get a bit more time I'll have to play with this, for sure. Thank you! :hug:

And it's very green. It's not like many people's idea of Texas at all. And it's quite liberal. I love living here.

it's fabulous. Seriously, it looks like an illustration.

(Or a scan as in this case.) There is often more there than may appear at first look. This is how Picture Windows Pro handles this situation with a single image, although the same procedure will work if two differently exposed originals serve as sources.

This is the original photo -- a bit too light in the mountain-sky area and maybe too dark in the foreground.


A mask can then be created according to the brightness range (or other characteristics). In this case the problem areas were all brighter than the rest of the photo, but if there is a lot of overlap between the two areas the paint tool (or several others) could be used to add or subtract from the mask as needed.


Once the mask is created and the original image opened also, you use the mask when applying whatever transformation you wish to implement. The following image used the mask to make the "Levels and Colors" adjustment apply only to the black area in that mask:


The mask can then be reversed, if desired, to apply other transformations to the white area in the mask, as shown in this image:


Of course, using masks makes it possible to make extreme changes to selected areas of an original image, turning a green tree into a red one and such, but it also allows you to get show more of what was in the original image(s). I assume other photo processing software has similar capabilities, and learning to use these tools will certainly be worth the effort, since the software that converts a digital image from a scanner ot a camera into a .jpg file will be good enough in some cases, but not all.

I can't remember if it's Popular Photography or American Photo. Their tutorial uses Photoshop and Nikon Capture, but it should work with any image-processing software with a RAW converter. There are also several commercial plug-ins for Photoshop that will automate the process, but I suspect you can get better results doing it "by hand."

but it's geared to PhotoShop, as usual, not PaintShop. I have a book that tells how to do all this stuff in PaintShop, but it's still kind of over my head.

Using the original image to create the mask. Or at least using it as a starting-off point for the mask. Hmmm, must explore.....

because it's a common problem I have with my photos. I usually end up messing around with the shadow/midtone/highlight thing, but this method seems so much more effective.

E.g. this one needs help...

used to be a Jasc product though I think they were bought but they used to have a great newsletter and tutorials at their site. Also there are free tutorials out there just google Paint Shop Pro X (or whatever version). Even check out some of the older versions since they can help too.

...the same people who own WordPerfect, which is what we do all our legal word processing work on. I have a great instructional book that HullBoss bought me a while ago, and it does explain all this. I just haven't had time to really get into it in depth. Tech stuff always makes my head spin, but I know I need to learn it.

online tutorials is they are written by people that don't like the books so they keep them short and sweet. Some even have a pic to use and follow. But if Hullboss bought you a book you should at least give it a try. O8) It helps if you have a pic you really really want to "fix" to get in gear on stuff. I always use the index of books to look for specific things I want to do.
Back to checking on the basement now.:grr: ________ rain!!!

I used Picture Windows Pro's Transformation/Gray/Color Curves to bring up the brightness in the areas that are black (actually nearly black), and got this result:

Which is much more the way it actually looked, of course. You're so good at this stuff.

The reason I like that program is that it works very much in the way that I understand photos. I never got very skilled at it, but I did darkroom work almost as soon as I began taking pictures. When I bought a scanner to get some of my slides into digital format I tried a lot of programs -- PS, Elements, PSP, and some other paint oriented programs, but this was the only one that "made sense" to me. There's a lot more to learn, and each person will find a different "style" most suitable., But, for me, the programmer of PWP has approached digital photo processing in a way that I can understand, if not yet master. In the case of your photo, the problem I saw was that the dark areas were too dark, so the solution was simply to brighten them up, and the PWP programmers had made that an easy one-step process.rather than some arcane series of expert-level steps.

Looks like it should be on the cover of an Austin Magazine. Isn't that a great method to get what you want when the light isn't cooperating.