Sunday 1 February 2009

FEBRUARY - MULTIPLE EXPOSURES .................(Top image is final combination)






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A very simple conversion to keep the detail in the sky:

This was taken on a walk with a friend and her new dog who we have to get used to as we are likely to have her on their holidays. It is Rivenhall with the Church which constantly has a St George Flag at the top as opposed to Messing who take their flag up and down on certain days throughout the year and Geoff has to climb the tower to do it. I guess they have no-one to take theirs up and down and so they leave it up. However I am digressing.

We won’t go into the settings for Adobe Camera RAW but suffice to say that one was just about a normal setting without much adjustment. The other conversion I lowered the exposure and used the “add black sliders” for the sky.

1. I saved both versions as PSDs and opened them in PSCS3.
2. I used the sky version as the background layer and grabbed the lighter one and put on top of the background layer. The best way to do this is to just use the Arrow at the top of the toolbar then keep your finger on the ALT button and drag the lighter version on top of the sky version. This will centre it perfectly.
3. In the layers panel click on the first square at the bottom which has a round circle in it. It is next to the fx. This will Brng up a layer mask. Then you make sure the two squares at the bottom of the tool bar are black and white with black on top. There is a keyboard shortcut to do this but I can’t remember it. So if it is not like that click on the little version of it until you get the two main squares underneath with the black on top. The colour on top is always the one that will be used. Then click on the brush tool and choose quite a large size soft brush depending on how much sky you have and paint over it. This has the effect of erasing it. You may wonder why you don’t just use the erase tool but this method is good as if you go wrong you don’t merely have to hit undo but you can click on those squares again and get the white one on top and this will fill it all back in again. Comes in very useful for intricate work.
4. Once you have done the top bit you can fiddle around changing the size of the brush to get around nooks and crannies. But when you get to the bottom it is actually best to use quite a big brush bigger than a bottle top but reduce the opacity in the top bar to about 65ish then carefully go over the bottom bit. With a soft brush it does spread a bit outside of the area of the brush so just keep the brush in the sky and don’t go over the land. It is OK to go over tops of trees slightly.
5. That was all I did with this one Apart from Flattening the Layer when you are happy. One way of flattening the layer is to right click in the layers palette (sorry Mac lovers) and click flatten image. Of course you can also go to the top and scroll down under the Layer thingy and do the same thing.

10 comments:

Katie J said...

This is a very easy one to get us going. As I said they are just two exposures converted from one RAW image. But this could just as easily be done in camera but of course it would need a tripod to get it spot on.
Just want to point out that if you view them all together on my screen the bottom of the lighter one looks lighter than the combo one but it is just the position on the monitor as I guess my light is not even all over the monitor. They are in fact the same.
Also I did crop off some of the sky in the final one as I thought it looked better.
Will be interesting to see everyone elses attempts and if they do it a different way.

Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

Very nice! Nice work!

The bottom one really does look lighter, though!

I have a Mac--I am NOT a mac lover, in fact, I really am not fond it all--but it does have a right click. And that's the mouse that came with it.

Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

I checked difficult, becae it sounds hard--but these things always sound hard when you write them down--when I actually TRY it, it may not BE that hard.

Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

Difficult, that is.

Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

I do not understand step 2 about dragging it--where are you dragging it FROM?

Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

Wait a minute, I'm confused. Is the TOP one the final one?

Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

OK, I did one--basically for the experience or the technique, but dunno if I can POST it.

Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

I emailed mine, but it did NOT show up! :-(

Katie J said...

Sorry yes the top one is the final one. I will try and go back to the post and see if I can make that clear.

I guess you must have figured out about dragging it. Yes you drag it just direct from one image to another. No need to make a layer first.

Hope yours shows up soon. I did add an extra option of easy after difficult but they only seem to want to show three options.

Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

Yes, the top one is definitely the BEST! The technique improved the image!

I put my best at the bottom, showing the steps I went through, but it still hasn't posted.

If I have to do it the hard way and resize all the pix, not sure when I'll get to it, as I have to go do some other things.