Photomatix's Exposure Blending software Video

Exposure Blending Panoramic Photography

Hi, welcome back, this is episode 3, and I’m gonna do today a tutorial on some landscape photography. I hadn’t done any location video on this one, for the simple fact is it’s a, as you have noticed in the first two videos the video quality left a lot to be desired. And you remember in the first video I blamed my colleague for not setting the video properly while I also get the second video myself and set the camera and it still came out very lousy. So we’ve kinda looked into it and decided the camera must be faulty, so we bend that, and we’ll gonna be in the process of sorting a new camera and hopefully we can get back on track and I can give you some video to view, which would be nice. Anyway, so we’re not gonna do any behind the scenes kind of on location video, but what I’m gonna do here is just take you to some of the retouching and some exposure blending and so forth. I was lucky to spend the week with the family away in Cornwall, which is in the South West of England, in case you don’t know. And it was a bit of a wet week, to be honest with you, but we had a bit of a breaking weather and I managed to go out and get some shots at Cape Cornwall. And this is a place here in front of us called Preacher’s Cove. So what I’m gonna do here is basic do, there’s a lot of contrast in the shots, as you see, it was nearly sunset and so the differences between the shadows and the bright sky was quite dramatic. So I needed to also take several different exposures or I could have put a graduated filter on, which would’ve been properly, maybe a simpler, simple solution, but, you know, this is the way I’m used in doing stuff, and it gives me that a little bit more control. So, what I do is take several different exposures to capture the very brightest detail in the sky to the shadow detail, beside the cliff here. And what we’re gonna do is actually blend this into one file, I used the exposure blend which comes to be photomatics. I mentioned this in the ebook, which you would’ve received. So I thought it would be nice just to actually take it show in a video, which, I always find videos to training tutorials a little bit easier to follow than sometimes reading about stuff. It’s best to be shown is a better way of learning I think. So what would first I’m gonna do is, obviously I’ve gone through the images, I’ve picked out the first illusion on one. This is the, this is the right hand side of the, of the picture. And this down here is the left hand side of our panoramic. But we’ll come back to that one in a minute, we’re gonna, first of all, I will just let this file images and then drag those so, we’ll drag the raw files we’ll test the JP level on, but I’m using them to see raw files. I’m gonna drag the raw files into photomatix. Right, so I’ve got my raw files selected, the ones which I wish to were used in the exposure blend, and we’ve got photomatix open here. So basically what I’ve done is highlight those and drag them into this box here. We’ve clicked the align source images by matching the features that basically do what it says, just align the images by matching those features in the files. And then when click ok, and allow that to work its magic and process that. We’ll come back to this in a second. Okay, so, we’ve got our image onscreen, there’s several different options here, now you can try, try this other, other options for yourself. I had a play around and I’ve found this option, this highlight and shadow, the 2 images works quite well with this one. As I said, each image would be different, so it’s worth, I’m gonna play around with those. So the first image we need to pick out, I need to pick out one of this, one of these files. I’ve loaded four. I wanna try and just pick out the best one for this guide. I would want this, and because I’ve got obviously several loaded, I’ve got the, I’ve got the option. I’m picking out the one I require, that looks pretty good, so we’re load that one, that’s gonna be for the, as I said for the sky area. Now we need to find one that balances nicely with that for the foreground. See this one creates a very funny halo along the crevices, so that’s probably going a bit too far. That’s gonna be too dark, that one looks pretty good, or that one. I’ll say probably, we’ll probably go with that one. So once you’ve picked out the two, from there we can just click process and that will, that will develop that and bring us some nice test file look with their exposures blended. Okay, so there we go, there’s the test file is blended the two images we’ve chosen. The one for the sky, one for the foreground, now obviously this is still, as I consider, in a raw state, we could go in and do a lot more to this, and we will need to. But it’s a good starting point, now, what we can do now, that’s the, that’s the right hand of our panoramic, I need now to do the same thing with the other images I showed you for the left side, and then we shall have to work with the two- two files ready for, ready for photoshop to blend into a panoramic for us. So, that’s what we’re gonna do next, we’re going to make a panoramic. Where in a photo bridge and we’ve got our two files in front of us which photomatic has blended for us. This is the side I talk you through, which is the, makes the right side of our panoramic and this is the one I did after which makes the left hand side. Same, same, just the same way of doing it, just drag the files into photomatics and just try and blend them as whimsically as possible. So now we collect, select the two, two files. Go in, within the bridge and go tools, photoshop, photomerge, and that will open up the photomerge dialog box. Again, lots of options here. Have a play around if you wish, I normally leave this in auto coz it, it works, and if it works, then why touch it, that’s my philosophy. So let’s let auto, select the blend images together option, that will help blend the two files, blend the joints together, and done a pretty good job, so I recommend selecting that. And then click ok and that will, now process those two files and it gives us our panoramic. I’ll show you in a second, we’ll use slit in this the function is, the images come out, rather funny shape, but I’ll show you that in a second. You recall I mentioned earlier when we’re in the photoblend in photoshop that the images can come out rather a funny looking shape, well, here’s the example of that. This is the file we processed, stitched together, and as you can see it come out rather, rather distorted, but don’t worry about that. Just, just go in and crop it down. I just want to show you it can also, it can look a bit, bit shockingly berserk, but it’s basically stunning to see it. It come out funny shape coz it has to match the perspective of the two images and since it has to twist and distort the file just to get it all to blend together, so just go in and just crop that down and all will be well again. Remember our image open in photoshop, you’ll see that I’ve actually cropped that down a little bit. I’ve left a little gap here and reason being is I kind of feel at the moment, I’d like to keep as much of this foreground rock in as possible. I don’t know why, this is one of those instant of things I feel like it just stay there. I feel that if I crop up to here, ultimately I’m gonna crop off that. I may change my mind, for now I’m just gonna leave this, I’ll look at it later and decide from there. But, here’s, here’s our layers. Now you’ll see, this is the two, two layers that photomerges I put for us and they got the masks with them, I just toggle that on, see that’s the mask which is actually blend in, the blending mask that’s stitching both the images together. Good idea to do is just to go into, into your file at a hundred percent and basically just scroll down the image and did actually by using the navigator, which can be a bit easier, coz your little icon there, you can scroll around. The only little thing about this is that if it is a good blend, you’ll not gonna see where the blend is, which can be a bit of a problem, so, you might want to turn just toggle those on and off so you can keep an eye on where the blend is. Also you’ll notice as well photoshop doesn’t blend the images in a straightline. It took a random pattern down which obviously will help disguise the joint, but it still done the job well which has done here so far, you’re not gonna see where it is, so. You might want to turn that one off. So basically just do that and just scroll down the image and just check, do a hundred percent check, you can't see any nasty surprises. There’s a little bit of a step here, I’ll just zoom in, if you see here, it just steps, but being clouds, probably get away with that. I may fuss of not to, not to leave that as it is, but it’s not really a major problem no one is really gonna look at that especially at normal viewers and see there’s any problem. But here is a problem, you’ll see here, horizons are normally straight where as this one is have a nice step in it which I don’t think will go away with some of that. So we need to go in and try to sort that out, and that can be a bit tricky, I have that problem a few times on panoramic sea images, so that needs to be sorted out. Apart from that, I think, I think that’s pretty good, pretty good blend, can't see mistakes from all of that. So what you’re going to do is go and do little bit retouching just to sort out that problem. We might be able to go to the layer mask and just mask that out. So, we’ll go and have a look at that next. Right, so the first thing I’m gonna do before we do anything else just to make life easier is just to, make sure everything else is off as you got it any of the layers on, you shouldn’t have at this stage, but make sure nothing else on. Just your, the two, two blended layers there and just add a blank layer on top of those two, like so. And then, what we’re gonna do is basically blend this two layers in to one layer for our stamp. And we do that by going to the layers, layer menu here, and you said down the bottom here, it says merge visible. Now, if you do that, it will just flatten the whole thing into one layer. We don’t wanna do that, we wanna merge it into the that from top here, so what I’m gonna do is to hold down my Alt key and then scroll down to the merge visible and keep holding the Alt key down. And that’s what it’s gonna do is run and blend the whole lot into one flatten file. It’s gonna blend, do a stamp into this blank layer here, and that gives us just the, a nice clean layer, to retouch the any problems we’ve got in the images in that one layer. It just makes life a bit easier. What you can do while it’s processing, I just tell you can, you can actually know, if you wanted to, you let go of the Alt key, you can now, if you want to just delete this two files at away, or, I prefer to keep them. Just in case I need to go back for any reason, I’m gonna keep this in place for now, but you can turn this off now and you’ll see, we’ve got that these two files, the two panoramic files blended into one nice layer now, just to make life a lot bit easier for doing the retouching. So we got our layer now, one despotted, get rid of all the nasty bits of dust and so far, that’s now completed. So now we can go on move on and maybe just the color and the contrast then the image and basically make it look, look the way we want it to look. So first thing I’m gonna do, I’m going to, I’m gonna overlay into the layer onto this, just to boost some of the blacks and there’s several different ways to do this. But this is just one of them which I do quite often. You duplicate the, that layer and I simply do no adjustment layer, I’m just gonna go straight on the layer itself. Go to desaturate and that takes all the color out of the image. I then again, no adjustments there, and I’m gonna work straight in the image, go to adjustments, curves. Then what I’m gonna try and do here is to bleach out lot of stuff we don’t need and just retains some of these dark areas. So you can do that by just basically lightening the image quite a lot, like so. Just pull this a little bit, oops not far. That should do this, so not a pretty picture, but you’ll see as we move on my intentions, like so. And now we can use the blending mouse to go from normal to multiply, okay, and that what that’s, that’s also adding quite a lot more density to the darker areas. Obviously, don’t want that much. But again, because we’re on a separate layer, we can drop down the apacity a fair bit and get the density roughly right the areas we are looking for, like so. And then, on that layer, we can add a layer mask and what we can do there, we can now select a layer mask, select our paint bucket tool and fill that layer mask with black, so when you see the image here before and that takes away all your fake. Now we can get white on to that foreground color, like so. And get the paintbrush and now we got the option of actually painting in just in the areas that you want selectedly paint in the adjustment to, to the image. So we’ve now painted in back in to match in white so that the effect shows through for the image. And basically you can see by me toggling this on and off, let me just zoom in a little tad, like so. I’ll toggle this off, and you can see the areas that are affected, fairly subtle and in some areas, depending on how much I painted that through. But it’s just adds a little bit more mood to the image, and again, if we, if we carry on and, you know, we add a bit too much we can also go back and just adjust the apaste on that and pull the effect a little bit. And I will actually do that. Put it down to 70 percent, so it’s not so harsh. So that’s one way of adjusting the layer in that manner. There is just a way of doing it, but that’s the way I probably done for a long time, so that’s that effect. And then we can go on and just make some other adjustments, we should take you now. First of all, there’s quite a bit mist coming off the cliff here which I want to retain, I think it basically gives a feeling of more depth. Let me just zoom in again and because you’re not gonna see much I think out there. So, you know, you wanna try and retain that, it adds a nice bit of depth to the image. So what I’ve done is to bring that back out again, and again I’ve done an adjustment there, color adjustments there, just lighten that part of the area. Fill the image with black and then did my selective, selective painting of the image back here. And that just basically a lighting layer just to lighten that area of the image and just to bring back the mist just off the cliff there. And I think that just, just gives that feeling of depth to the image. Just a little bit spill there, so I’ll just go back in and clear that up while we’re, while we’re on that, and make sure my foreground color is set to black and just, I’m just painting that back. And that’s the beauty of you, adjusting in different layers is that we can, you know, if you spot a mistake like that, you can go back in and jut sort them out. Now, it’s quite those line there, and again, a little trick is to make sure your image there is selected, get a lasso tool and get in that area and just make a rough selection, and then go to filter, blur, caussian blur, and you just go to that part of the mask, and just, just soften that area, so you don’t get any nasty lines showing up the way you just been retouching that. There’s another bit here, well actually in the cliff, so let’s just go in and again sort that out, just very subtly. I’m using it again, using a pressure sensitive tablet and pen, so I can have a bit more control over the painting. So yeah, so that’s just I think just gives a little bit a depth to the image, like so. My next layer was a bit of selective contrast. Again, we’ve been those before, I just made an adjustment there and added some contrast and again selectedly I just painted that in, in the areas I want which in this case was the sea area down there, like so. Next layer was all about what I’ve done so far is to intensify the color in the sky, sorry, one layer, intensify the color of the sky, like so to warm bit up, and just kept the foreground pretty cool a moment, but I think we have to adjust that a little bit. It’s a little bit magenta and we don’t want it like that, we want it keep it cold but not magenta. Next layer is the edge curves, like so. Again, selected adjustments there, just paint it in, just dark in some corners. And this one is the level adjustment which is sometimes put in just so I can keep an eye on what’s happening on the image so all this adjustment layer. Just a little more adjustment to do just to quickly I can hold down the Alt key and drag the highlight slider and just see that tells me where the highlights are basically, clip in, that’s actually ok, because it’s not bleaching out to white. And you need some, some, you know, very bright areas in the picture otherwise it’s gonna end up very flat. In this end, it tells you where the shadow’s are blocking up, and I can make sure by looking at this no important detail is being lost. I think I may wanna go back in and just lighten this area a little bit, and that’s gonna bit too far, but apart from that, is a good check. So next, we can just go back and do that and also, just adjust the color a little bit better to the image. So it’s better well balance. Right, so I think what we’ll gonna do now is just, after looking at that there, I’m gonna go back in to this overlay, this multiply layer and just take away some of the, some of the effect there coz I done it to go to heavy in this area and loose this side of this little, this quaint little shack, so again this shows you, you know the good reasons of working with layers, is that you can go back and edit them, and like so. So, that helps that bring some of the detail back in there and like so. And I think basically now, it’s just a matter of just getting in this foreground color, how I want it. Like I said, it’s gone a little bit, little bit magenta, I don’t know how you’ll see it in your screen, I’ll move it better, I can show you that it’s too magenta. So, what we can do again is go back in now and just adjust the color balance to the foreground to correct that. So I’ll go into our color balance layer and click the shadows option and like I said, in this area here, I feel the brick work is a little bit magenta, so we’re gonna take some, add some green in there. Just try, kinda balance that, and that looks about right. Let’s do the, toggle off the preview, have a look. Yeah, that’s, that’s a lot better. So that’s, that’s all for that, fairly quickly and easily. Just zoom back again so we can have a look at the raw picture. I think the next thing to do really is bring out little bit, add a little bit contrast into the, into this area of the image. I have to bring out the shack, and this rustic old door and to generally just kind of guide people’s eye to the shot into the areas you want them to, that’s gonna be on our next, our next adjustment level, adjustment layer, sorry. So we’ll click, click the adjustment layer button and go to curves again and just very roughly we’ll just gonna, just try and go into this area and make an adjustment. I do want a shadow so we’ll gonna leave that where it is, but we’ll just open up some of the mid tones there, like so. Went too, went too far, that was just over, over the crusted layer, other layer as to the layer, like so. Okay. Again do my usual trick zoom that over here a second, paint bucket, make your foreground to black and fill that layer with black. And that takes away the adjustments and then we can get our paint brush tool and actually the foreground is now set to white. You can do that shortcut is to click, click the X button on your keyboard and now we can just go in gently paint in the contrast for that area, like so. Now you’ll notice again, I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll mention it again, because the adjustment layer, because the adjustment is set to normal, we have pit of a bit of a color, like a extra bit of a saturation. If you don’t want that, you can just move the layer mode to luminousity and that will give you the contrast without the, without the nasty color shift. We’ll see, now state the mark that you want but, yeah, I don’t want on that around. And now we just go in to these areas, and what I’m basically doing is just, basically guiding people’s eye to that area. And your eye will follow color and follow contrasts, so I’m just using the extra contrasts here, to guide people’s, the viewer eye into this shot, like so. And that is very, very roughly done, we’ll go back and redo that a little bit more care. But for this tutorial, I just wanna show you, don’t wanna bore you doing this for five, ten minutes. So again, you just graze all the, and obviously toggle on and off, you can see that neatly, just draws your eye into the, the area of the picture, and obviously guide toggle on the foreground to black again and if you want to, just paint. So that back layer we can take some of that out, if we’re not happy with the, that part there. So, yeah, so very versatile and good way of just drawing people’s attention to where you want them to go in the image. So we can also name that, probably name that sort of like selective contrast. It’s a good idea to name all your layers coz you know, you can sit and with 20, 30 layers and if you don’t what, what they are, you know, it’s a good idea to name them so you can quickly refer to them. So that’s that part, another bit down. I’m still not 100 percent happy with the color, but again, that’s something else we can look at next. Right, so, we’re going to adjust the color a little bit more, and we’ll do that by using the curve adjustment layer, not like color balance. But I think it just gives a little bit more control over where I want the color, we can almost split tone the image. So this is the, I’ll just zoom in a little bit so you can see, hopefully a little bit better on what’s going on. I notice, just like before, the colors I see on my screen which was also calibrated. Don’t know if it’s the same in the video, so got to bear with me. So here is the image as it is in the screen at the moment, and this is the curve adjustment there I made to adjust the color. And I’m just basically, I’m not toggle off again, I’m just basically just adding a bit more, more redness to the sky and highlights on the sea. And just again warming up the rocks a little bit in the foreground here, they’re quite cool, which I want. But I don’t wanna go in too much, so I just kind of, you know brought that out a little bit. I’ve tried to keep the sea fairly cool, so, and I did that by basically creating a curves adjustment layer and adjusting the individual channel. So for instance, going to the red channel, this part of the histogram and curve is the highlights, and this ends obviously shows and between the mid tones, so if you just watch the sky, I’m gonna just adjust this quite severely so you can see. As I push this up, it gets a lot redder, and as I put it down, it has the opposite effects. So, just somewhere in between there, I just wanna basically just add a little bit of red to the highlight end of the curve. And basically try to leave pretty much the rest of it as it is. I have a little bit more, try to put that down, a little bit more calmness to the, to the sea there. And we do the same again, and pick up the green, again the purpose of the show, and midtones as they are, but, just added a little bit of magenta in there. Just smudgen, and again the blue, I’m taking a little bit of the blue at the rocks and go too far, just adding blue and I’ll put it down, just adding a little bit of green and taking it, and adding, and taking away, sorry, I mean the blue from the rocks on the foreground. And leaving, leaving the highlights in the land. So it’s just basically little bit more control over the, the color in the picture, less that it’s almost like split toning. So just the way, you could use your color balance, I just found a little bit easier to control, but again it’s a perfect reference I quite like to do stuff with, just with the color with the, with the curves. And so that’s pretty much it. You might just also, I’ve crop my image and decided that I could leave with the crop as it was, rather than retouching it, and extending the foreground. And so that what it is, I just crop it down and all I got really left to do on this picture is just to, just to sharpen it. But I’ll leave that for another tutorial, coz I can do that in a kinda special way. Not a special way, but I use a bit of software for my, for my sharpening, and I choose a sharpening edges rather that sharpening the whole image. I tend to sharpen just the edges. And again we can actually do that, but we’ll leave that for another, for another time. So, that’s basically it, it’s fairly easy, you know, fairly straight forward retouch. Nothing too strenuous there, just a few adjustment layers and obviously using photomatic, we can quite quickly combine the exposures we shot to control the, the quite, quite severe contrast that is in this shot. Yeah, I’m pretty pleased with that, and again you can probably spend the, excuse me, probably spend a lot more time on this and (audio not clear 31:28), I probably will come back a bit later just to fine tune a bit more but I would 99 percent very. Just a basically a personal preference just to sit, put it on one side. Spend a bit time with the picture and decide if, if it is actually finish. There is a tendency to be able to just keep finding stuff on the image and basically over do it, you should be very careful to where to draw the line. But I hope that was interest, next episode, don’t know. Don’t know what we’re doing yet, but that’s where I’d like you to come in, perhaps you email me, you know, so, drop me an email. Give me a bit feedback about tutorials a bit. I think we’re get in there, we just sort of this video out for the location where shooting so we can get behind the scenes footage again out on location, and a bit some. Come write to me, let me know, give me some, give me some thought about what you would like to see, and we’ll try and cover it for you. Anyway, thanks for watching, I hope you enjoy that, and don’t forget to drop me an email. Cheers. Bye bye.

ProPhotoInsights.Net

"Step Behind The Scenes On Pro photo Shoots"

http://www.ProPhotoInsights.Net

Hi, welcome back, this is episode 3, and I’m gonna do today a tutorial on some landscape photography. I hadn’t done any location video on this one, for the simple fact is it’s a, as you have noticed in the first two videos the video quality left a lot to be desired. And you remember in the first video I blamed my colleague for not setting the video properly while I also get the second video myself and set the camera and it still came out very lousy. So we’ve kinda looked into it and decided the camera must be faulty, so we bend that, and we’ll gonna be in the process of sorting a new camera and hopefully we can get back on track and I can give you some video to view, which would be nice. Anyway, so we’re not gonna do any behind the scenes kind of on location video, but what I’m gonna do here is just take you to some of the retouching and some exposure blending and so forth. I was lucky to spend the week with the family away in Cornwall, which is in the South West of England, in case you don’t know. And it was a bit of a wet week, to be honest with you, but we had a bit of a breaking weather and I managed to go out and get some shots at Cape Cornwall. And this is a place here in front of us called Preacher’s Cove. So what I’m gonna do here is basic do, there’s a lot of contrast in the shots, as you see, it was nearly sunset and so the differences between the shadows and the bright sky was quite dramatic. So I needed to also take several different exposures or I could have put a graduated filter on, which would’ve been properly, maybe a simpler, simple solution, but, you know, this is the way I’m used in doing stuff, and it gives me that a little bit more control. So, what I do is take several different exposures to capture the very brightest detail in the sky to the shadow detail, beside the cliff here. And what we’re gonna do is actually blend this into one file, I used the exposure blend which comes to be photomatics. I mentioned this in the ebook, which you would’ve received. So I thought it would be nice just to actually take it show in a video, which, I always find videos to training tutorials a little bit easier to follow than sometimes reading about stuff. It’s best to be shown is a better way of learning I think. So what would first I’m gonna do is, obviously I’ve gone through the images, I’ve picked out the first illusion on one. This is the, this is the right hand side of the, of the picture. And this down here is the left hand side of our panoramic. But we’ll come back to that one in a minute, we’re gonna, first of all, I will just let this file images and then drag those so, we’ll drag the raw files we’ll test the JP level on, but I’m using them to see raw files. I’m gonna drag the raw files into photomatix. Right, so I’ve got my raw files selected, the ones which I wish to were used in the exposure blend, and we’ve got photomatix open here. So basically what I’ve done is highlight those and drag them into this box here. We’ve clicked the align source images by matching the features that basically do what it says, just align the images by matching those features in the files. And then when click ok, and allow that to work its magic and process that. We’ll come back to this in a second. Okay, so, we’ve got our image onscreen, there’s several different options here, now you can try, try this other, other options for yourself. I had a play around and I’ve found this option, this highlight and shadow, the 2 images works quite well with this one. As I said, each image would be different, so it’s worth, I’m gonna play around with those. So the first image we need to pick out, I need to pick out one of this, one of these files. I’ve loaded four. I wanna try and just pick out the best one for this guide. I would want this, and because I’ve got obviously several loaded, I’ve got the, I’ve got the option. I’m picking out the one I require, that looks pretty good, so we’re load that one, that’s gonna be for the, as I said for the sky area. Now we need to find one that balances nicely with that for the foreground. See this one creates a very funny halo along the crevices, so that’s probably going a bit too far. That’s gonna be too dark, that one looks pretty good, or that one. I’ll say probably, we’ll probably go with that one. So once you’ve picked out the two, from there we can just click process and that will, that will develop that and bring us some nice test file look with their exposures blended. Okay, so there we go, there’s the test file is blended the two images we’ve chosen. The one for the sky, one for the foreground, now obviously this is still, as I consider, in a raw state, we could go in and do a lot more to this, and we will need to. But it’s a good starting point, now, what we can do now, that’s the, that’s the right hand of our panoramic, I need now to do the same thing with the other images I showed you for the left side, and then we shall have to work with the two- two files ready for, ready for photoshop to blend into a panoramic for us. So, that’s what we’re gonna do next, we’re going to make a panoramic. Where in a photo bridge and we’ve got our two files in front of us which photomatic has blended for us. This is the side I talk you through, which is the, makes the right side of our panoramic and this is the one I did after which makes the left hand side. Same, same, just the same way of doing it, just drag the files into photomatics and just try and blend them as whimsically as possible. So now we collect, select the two, two files. Go in, within the bridge and go tools, photoshop, photomerge, and that will open up the photomerge dialog box. Again, lots of options here. Have a play around if you wish, I normally leave this in auto coz it, it works, and if it works, then why touch it, that’s my philosophy. So let’s let auto, select the blend images together option, that will help blend the two files, blend the joints together, and done a pretty good job, so I recommend selecting that. And then click ok and that will, now process those two files and it gives us our panoramic. I’ll show you in a second, we’ll use slit in this the function is, the images come out, rather funny shape, but I’ll show you that in a second. You recall I mentioned earlier when we’re in the photoblend in photoshop that the images can come out rather a funny looking shape, well, here’s the example of that. This is the file we processed, stitched together, and as you can see it come out rather, rather distorted, but don’t worry about that. Just, just go in and crop it down. I just want to show you it can also, it can look a bit, bit shockingly berserk, but it’s basically stunning to see it. It come out funny shape coz it has to match the perspective of the two images and since it has to twist and distort the file just to get it all to blend together, so just go in and just crop that down and all will be well again. Remember our image open in photoshop, you’ll see that I’ve actually cropped that down a little bit. I’ve left a little gap here and reason being is I kind of feel at the moment, I’d like to keep as much of this foreground rock in as possible. I don’t know why, this is one of those instant of things I feel like it just stay there. I feel that if I crop up to here, ultimately I’m gonna crop off that. I may change my mind, for now I’m just gonna leave this, I’ll look at it later and decide from there. But, here’s, here’s our layers. Now you’ll see, this is the two, two layers that photomerges I put for us and they got the masks with them, I just toggle that on, see that’s the mask which is actually blend in, the blending mask that’s stitching both the images together. Good idea to do is just to go into, into your file at a hundred percent and basically just scroll down the image and did actually by using the navigator, which can be a bit easier, coz your little icon there, you can scroll around. The only little thing about this is that if it is a good blend, you’ll not gonna see where the blend is, which can be a bit of a problem, so, you might want to turn just toggle those on and off so you can keep an eye on where the blend is. Also you’ll notice as well photoshop doesn’t blend the images in a straightline. It took a random pattern down which obviously will help disguise the joint, but it still done the job well which has done here so far, you’re not gonna see where it is, so. You might want to turn that one off. So basically just do that and just scroll down the image and just check, do a hundred percent check, you can't see any nasty surprises. There’s a little bit of a step here, I’ll just zoom in, if you see here, it just steps, but being clouds, probably get away with that. I may fuss of not to, not to leave that as it is, but it’s not really a major problem no one is really gonna look at that especially at normal viewers and see there’s any problem. But here is a problem, you’ll see here, horizons are normally straight where as this one is have a nice step in it which I don’t think will go away with some of that. So we need to go in and try to sort that out, and that can be a bit tricky, I have that problem a few times on panoramic sea images, so that needs to be sorted out. Apart from that, I think, I think that’s pretty good, pretty good blend, can't see mistakes from all of that. So what you’re going to do is go and do little bit retouching just to sort out that problem. We might be able to go to the layer mask and just mask that out. So, we’ll go and have a look at that next. Right, so the first thing I’m gonna do before we do anything else just to make life easier is just to, make sure everything else is off as you got it any of the layers on, you shouldn’t have at this stage, but make sure nothing else on. Just your, the two, two blended layers there and just add a blank layer on top of those two, like so. And then, what we’re gonna do is basically blend this two layers in to one layer for our stamp. And we do that by going to the layers, layer menu here, and you said down the bottom here, it says merge visible. Now, if you do that, it will just flatten the whole thing into one layer. We don’t wanna do that, we wanna merge it into the that from top here, so what I’m gonna do is to hold down my Alt key and then scroll down to the merge visible and keep holding the Alt key down. And that’s what it’s gonna do is run and blend the whole lot into one flatten file. It’s gonna blend, do a stamp into this blank layer here, and that gives us just the, a nice clean layer, to retouch the any problems we’ve got in the images in that one layer. It just makes life a bit easier. What you can do while it’s processing, I just tell you can, you can actually know, if you wanted to, you let go of the Alt key, you can now, if you want to just delete this two files at away, or, I prefer to keep them. Just in case I need to go back for any reason, I’m gonna keep this in place for now, but you can turn this off now and you’ll see, we’ve got that these two files, the two panoramic files blended into one nice layer now, just to make life a lot bit easier for doing the retouching. So we got our layer now, one despotted, get rid of all the nasty bits of dust and so far, that’s now completed. So now we can go on move on and maybe just the color and the contrast then the image and basically make it look, look the way we want it to look. So first thing I’m gonna do, I’m going to, I’m gonna overlay into the layer onto this, just to boost some of the blacks and there’s several different ways to do this. But this is just one of them which I do quite often. You duplicate the, that layer and I simply do no adjustment layer, I’m just gonna go straight on the layer itself. Go to desaturate and that takes all the color out of the image. I then again, no adjustments there, and I’m gonna work straight in the image, go to adjustments, curves. Then what I’m gonna try and do here is to bleach out lot of stuff we don’t need and just retains some of these dark areas. So you can do that by just basically lightening the image quite a lot, like so. Just pull this a little bit, oops not far. That should do this, so not a pretty picture, but you’ll see as we move on my intentions, like so. And now we can use the blending mouse to go from normal to multiply, okay, and that what that’s, that’s also adding quite a lot more density to the darker areas. Obviously, don’t want that much. But again, because we’re on a separate layer, we can drop down the apacity a fair bit and get the density roughly right the areas we are looking for, like so. And then, on that layer, we can add a layer mask and what we can do there, we can now select a layer mask, select our paint bucket tool and fill that layer mask with black, so when you see the image here before and that takes away all your fake. Now we can get white on to that foreground color, like so. And get the paintbrush and now we got the option of actually painting in just in the areas that you want selectedly paint in the adjustment to, to the image. So we’ve now painted in back in to match in white so that the effect shows through for the image. And basically you can see by me toggling this on and off, let me just zoom in a little tad, like so. I’ll toggle this off, and you can see the areas that are affected, fairly subtle and in some areas, depending on how much I painted that through. But it’s just adds a little bit more mood to the image, and again, if we, if we carry on and, you know, we add a bit too much we can also go back and just adjust the apaste on that and pull the effect a little bit. And I will actually do that. Put it down to 70 percent, so it’s not so harsh. So that’s one way of adjusting the layer in that manner. There is just a way of doing it, but that’s the way I probably done for a long time, so that’s that effect. And then we can go on and just make some other adjustments, we should take you now. First of all, there’s quite a bit mist coming off the cliff here which I want to retain, I think it basically gives a feeling of more depth. Let me just zoom in again and because you’re not gonna see much I think out there. So, you know, you wanna try and retain that, it adds a nice bit of depth to the image. So what I’ve done is to bring that back out again, and again I’ve done an adjustment there, color adjustments there, just lighten that part of the area. Fill the image with black and then did my selective, selective painting of the image back here. And that just basically a lighting layer just to lighten that area of the image and just to bring back the mist just off the cliff there. And I think that just, just gives that feeling of depth to the image. Just a little bit spill there, so I’ll just go back in and clear that up while we’re, while we’re on that, and make sure my foreground color is set to black and just, I’m just painting that back. And that’s the beauty of you, adjusting in different layers is that we can, you know, if you spot a mistake like that, you can go back in and jut sort them out. Now, it’s quite those line there, and again, a little trick is to make sure your image there is selected, get a lasso tool and get in that area and just make a rough selection, and then go to filter, blur, caussian blur, and you just go to that part of the mask, and just, just soften that area, so you don’t get any nasty lines showing up the way you just been retouching that. There’s another bit here, well actually in the cliff, so let’s just go in and again sort that out, just very subtly. I’m using it again, using a pressure sensitive tablet and pen, so I can have a bit more control over the painting. So yeah, so that’s just I think just gives a little bit a depth to the image, like so. My next layer was a bit of selective contrast. Again, we’ve been those before, I just made an adjustment there and added some contrast and again selectedly I just painted that in, in the areas I want which in this case was the sea area down there, like so. Next layer was all about what I’ve done so far is to intensify the color in the sky, sorry, one layer, intensify the color of the sky, like so to warm bit up, and just kept the foreground pretty cool a moment, but I think we have to adjust that a little bit. It’s a little bit magenta and we don’t want it like that, we want it keep it cold but not magenta. Next layer is the edge curves, like so. Again, selected adjustments there, just paint it in, just dark in some corners. And this one is the level adjustment which is sometimes put in just so I can keep an eye on what’s happening on the image so all this adjustment layer. Just a little more adjustment to do just to quickly I can hold down the Alt key and drag the highlight slider and just see that tells me where the highlights are basically, clip in, that’s actually ok, because it’s not bleaching out to white. And you need some, some, you know, very bright areas in the picture otherwise it’s gonna end up very flat. In this end, it tells you where the shadow’s are blocking up, and I can make sure by looking at this no important detail is being lost. I think I may wanna go back in and just lighten this area a little bit, and that’s gonna bit too far, but apart from that, is a good check. So next, we can just go back and do that and also, just adjust the color a little bit better to the image. So it’s better well balance. Right, so I think what we’ll gonna do now is just, after looking at that there, I’m gonna go back in to this overlay, this multiply layer and just take away some of the, some of the effect there coz I done it to go to heavy in this area and loose this side of this little, this quaint little shack, so again this shows you, you know the good reasons of working with layers, is that you can go back and edit them, and like so. So, that helps that bring some of the detail back in there and like so. And I think basically now, it’s just a matter of just getting in this foreground color, how I want it. Like I said, it’s gone a little bit, little bit magenta, I don’t know how you’ll see it in your screen, I’ll move it better, I can show you that it’s too magenta. So, what we can do again is go back in now and just adjust the color balance to the foreground to correct that. So I’ll go into our color balance layer and click the shadows option and like I said, in this area here, I feel the brick work is a little bit magenta, so we’re gonna take some, add some green in there. Just try, kinda balance that, and that looks about right. Let’s do the, toggle off the preview, have a look. Yeah, that’s, that’s a lot better. So that’s, that’s all for that, fairly quickly and easily. Just zoom back again so we can have a look at the raw picture. I think the next thing to do really is bring out little bit, add a little bit contrast into the, into this area of the image. I have to bring out the shack, and this rustic old door and to generally just kind of guide people’s eye to the shot into the areas you want them to, that’s gonna be on our next, our next adjustment level, adjustment layer, sorry. So we’ll click, click the adjustment layer button and go to curves again and just very roughly we’ll just gonna, just try and go into this area and make an adjustment. I do want a shadow so we’ll gonna leave that where it is, but we’ll just open up some of the mid tones there, like so. Went too, went too far, that was just over, over the crusted layer, other layer as to the layer, like so. Okay. Again do my usual trick zoom that over here a second, paint bucket, make your foreground to black and fill that layer with black. And that takes away the adjustments and then we can get our paint brush tool and actually the foreground is now set to white. You can do that shortcut is to click, click the X button on your keyboard and now we can just go in gently paint in the contrast for that area, like so. Now you’ll notice again, I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll mention it again, because the adjustment layer, because the adjustment is set to normal, we have pit of a bit of a color, like a extra bit of a saturation. If you don’t want that, you can just move the layer mode to luminousity and that will give you the contrast without the, without the nasty color shift. We’ll see, now state the mark that you want but, yeah, I don’t want on that around. And now we just go in to these areas, and what I’m basically doing is just, basically guiding people’s eye to that area. And your eye will follow color and follow contrasts, so I’m just using the extra contrasts here, to guide people’s, the viewer eye into this shot, like so. And that is very, very roughly done, we’ll go back and redo that a little bit more care. But for this tutorial, I just wanna show you, don’t wanna bore you doing this for five, ten minutes. So again, you just graze all the, and obviously toggle on and off, you can see that neatly, just draws your eye into the, the area of the picture, and obviously guide toggle on the foreground to black again and if you want to, just paint. So that back layer we can take some of that out, if we’re not happy with the, that part there. So, yeah, so very versatile and good way of just drawing people’s attention to where you want them to go in the image. So we can also name that, probably name that sort of like selective contrast. It’s a good idea to name all your layers coz you know, you can sit and with 20, 30 layers and if you don’t what, what they are, you know, it’s a good idea to name them so you can quickly refer to them. So that’s that part, another bit down. I’m still not 100 percent happy with the color, but again, that’s something else we can look at next. Right, so, we’re going to adjust the color a little bit more, and we’ll do that by using the curve adjustment layer, not like color balance. But I think it just gives a little bit more control over where I want the color, we can almost split tone the image. So this is the, I’ll just zoom in a little bit so you can see, hopefully a little bit better on what’s going on. I notice, just like before, the colors I see on my screen which was also calibrated. Don’t know if it’s the same in the video, so got to bear with me. So here is the image as it is in the screen at the moment, and this is the curve adjustment there I made to adjust the color. And I’m just basically, I’m not toggle off again, I’m just basically just adding a bit more, more redness to the sky and highlights on the sea. And just again warming up the rocks a little bit in the foreground here, they’re quite cool, which I want. But I don’t wanna go in too much, so I just kind of, you know brought that out a little bit. I’ve tried to keep the sea fairly cool, so, and I did that by basically creating a curves adjustment layer and adjusting the individual channel. So for instance, going to the red channel, this part of the histogram and curve is the highlights, and this ends obviously shows and between the mid tones, so if you just watch the sky, I’m gonna just adjust this quite severely so you can see. As I push this up, it gets a lot redder, and as I put it down, it has the opposite effects. So, just somewhere in between there, I just wanna basically just add a little bit of red to the highlight end of the curve. And basically try to leave pretty much the rest of it as it is. I have a little bit more, try to put that down, a little bit more calmness to the, to the sea there. And we do the same again, and pick up the green, again the purpose of the show, and midtones as they are, but, just added a little bit of magenta in there. Just smudgen, and again the blue, I’m taking a little bit of the blue at the rocks and go too far, just adding blue and I’ll put it down, just adding a little bit of green and taking it, and adding, and taking away, sorry, I mean the blue from the rocks on the foreground. And leaving, leaving the highlights in the land. So it’s just basically little bit more control over the, the color in the picture, less that it’s almost like split toning. So just the way, you could use your color balance, I just found a little bit easier to control, but again it’s a perfect reference I quite like to do stuff with, just with the color with the, with the curves. And so that’s pretty much it. You might just also, I’ve crop my image and decided that I could leave with the crop as it was, rather than retouching it, and extending the foreground. And so that what it is, I just crop it down and all I got really left to do on this picture is just to, just to sharpen it. But I’ll leave that for another tutorial, coz I can do that in a kinda special way. Not a special way, but I use a bit of software for my, for my sharpening, and I choose a sharpening edges rather that sharpening the whole image. I tend to sharpen just the edges. And again we can actually do that, but we’ll leave that for another, for another time. So, that’s basically it, it’s fairly easy, you know, fairly straight forward retouch. Nothing too strenuous there, just a few adjustment layers and obviously using photomatic, we can quite quickly combine the exposures we shot to control the, the quite, quite severe contrast that is in this shot. Yeah, I’m pretty pleased with that, and again you can probably spend the, excuse me, probably spend a lot more time on this and (audio not clear 31:28), I probably will come back a bit later just to fine tune a bit more but I would 99 percent very. Just a basically a personal preference just to sit, put it on one side. Spend a bit time with the picture and decide if, if it is actually finish. There is a tendency to be able to just keep finding stuff on the image and basically over do it, you should be very careful to where to draw the line. But I hope that was interest, next episode, don’t know. Don’t know what we’re doing yet, but that’s where I’d like you to come in, perhaps you email me, you know, so, drop me an email. Give me a bit feedback about tutorials a bit. I think we’re get in there, we just sort of this video out for the location where shooting so we can get behind the scenes footage again out on location, and a bit some. Come write to me, let me know, give me some, give me some thought about what you would like to see, and we’ll try and cover it for you. Anyway, thanks for watching, I hope you enjoy that, and don’t forget to drop me an email. Cheers. Bye bye.

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Exposure Blending Panoramic Photography

Photomatix's Exposure Blending software -

Photomatix's Exposure Blending software -