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Digital Darkroom: Mulitple Exposure

So I have an image from Iceland on that beach with the big chunks of ice that I thought kind of diamonds on the roof. They're very dark, you can see but exposed for the background. And I was trying to play with, like, a fire and ice thing. And so I tried my hardest. A light a fire on one of these pieces of ice, which is not as easy as I thought. Shocking. You know, the instant you light something, it melts and create water, which then puts out the fire. That was quite a successful in what I was hoping for, hoping they're gonna get flames coming out. Anyway, I got this much light. You can see the reflection of the light bouncing off of me from the fire s. So if I wanted to have this glow in the ice, get the background from the other image and get rid of me, I can open both of those up is layers and photo shop and just keep coming back to masking for combining these two together. But this in this way you can combine on Maybe I would have individually, like, painted all the different iceb...

ergs so usually that I like to put the image that I have I'm going to use more of as my bottom layer. Just it's easier for me to conceptually think about it. But it doesn't matter whether you're masking in their masking out. Something about a poem might be careful what you're fencing in our fencing out fences make good neighbors. So I'm gonna make sure that I'm on black is my foreground color for painting out because my mask is currently totally see through. So I'm gonna hide paint myself out there. But I need a soft edge. That was kind of harsh. And zoom in so you can do appear to the brush. I'm actually already soft. I just I'm doing a bad job on the track pad. So to undo this area where I painted, I could undo that whole brush or can hit X to swap these two colors the black and the white, and, um or you can hit the little Ben de l aero thing there. So, with white and my foreground, I'm gonna bring that back in X again to hide out the red there and down here, I'm actually in front of that ice, I could paint it in. But then you see the area that is not glowing anymore, and it's pretty obvious. So instead of masking there, I'm gonna use an adjustment layer, hue and saturation on going to bring down the saturation. It's acting globally right now, but the adjustment layer gives me the ability to use a mask. So I'm going to instead of I'm gonna only want to do a little areas rather than masking the whole thing. I'm gonna with the brush I'm going to. I could either fill this with black, or I can invert it which control I or command. I inverted also in the menus. So then now I'm going to paint with white toe, have the areas where I want to de saturate it. So, um, in this case, MD saturating all the colors, right, So it's getting rid of that golden glow. So I'm gonna change the adjustment layer two gonna use the targeted. You'll see if I can pick up the Reds there. So by clicking on that red area chosen reds for me. So I'm gonna de saturate reds only and, uh, not quite working it maybe not wide enough area there. Uh, I mean it the entire I think it's back on this mask here in Britain. Reds? Get that? Um huh. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here, but, um, hopefully you get the idea of you can buy in this case, I was just hoping toe hide these red by darkening them down or de saturating them rather than totally masking them out in order to reveal Leave the golden tone behind. Um, there. Okay, have another example. I did the one thing topic that we haven't talked. We've touched on a few and we actually have. I've got another class coming up on HDR high dynamic range imagery, and the topic comes in on we're single shot in this case, you one of your milky ways taken out in the desert. Um, do you shoot a bracket it set of shots and try and do one of combined them through masks? I want to use this cornet of this one or this portion of this one and manually take three different exposures and pull them together to do you take three and combine them into a true high dynamic range image and then take advantage of the fact that you've got trillions of colors at your disposal that you then do dodging, burning or what's known as tone mapping to the file. And 1/3 alternative would be just to find one good exposure and then do kind of what I did on that last shot. To use that and then just see how far I can push a single exposure taking advantage of a CR like room. So that's three ways. If you got a challenge scene and you want to extend the dynamic range, do this tone mapping there one. Use a single exposure and push it just like we just did to shoot your different exposures and combine them manually using masks or three. Combine them into a true HDR. So what we have here are some of those examples of that. This is the scene in the desert that Brynn I'm shot. This is kind of a straight exposure. This one is over exposed, and he's using car headlights. We've talked about different ways, had a light up. The scenes of the car headlights were out there, and then another one where he's used a flashlight in order to lighten up, and I love the fact that you can see it's almost like, you know, an astronaut on the moon is down here. But eso three different exposures gotten three different ways. And again, the question is, how do you combine those? This is, um, using photo shop and masks to take those three to create your final image and these two versions or two variations on taking a single one of these exposures. In this case, I believe it was this under exposed one and then using a CR or light room. And I used this exposure for this one because it was the lighter one. This is the darker exposure and pushing a single exposure rather than combining them. But since we haven't covered this concept of HDR for a lot of people, they've never created a true high dynamic range image. So I thought that I would show people just that process because it's actually much, much easier. There's a lot of different third party Softwares that do this, but now Adobe has built into it. It's HDR tools photo shop merged HDR Pro. You get to this in light room by going down to your filmstrip selecting your range of exposures, right clicking on it and finding the same option. Merged HDR Pro. It's really meant for raw files will work with J pegs or tips, but they don't have the billions of colors in each one of those. Remember that A J Peg has been knocked down toe 256 shades of red, green and blue that ends up by the time you multiply those together to 16 million colors. But even a single raw file is gonna have billions of colors at its disposal as a default rather than millions. And as a default instead of, say, 2 56 shades of red Queen blue, you'll have 4000 minimum of great being in blue. And when you're dealing with night shots that have so much blue to begin with, it's nice toe have thousands rather than hundreds of colors at your disposal. But what we're doing here is you're going to see Here's the three exposures that I asked it to combine together. It gives me this interface as a deep wallets up here. This is the older interface for, um, Hdr Pro, where it wants you to do your mapping using things like a gamma slider and radius and strength, and it does have some really cool features. But what most people now we're doing or saying Don't do bit per channel. Please do 32 bits per channel, which is It's 32. It's to do the 32 power times three. And that is, you know, the math of that. How many potential colors, Aaron. It's flooding point quadrillion. Yeah, it's it's off the charts. But the thing to remember why I wanted to bring up this interface is you'll notice his resume up here that we're getting some serious what's known as ghosting because these weren't shot on a tripod, or at least these all these different scenes. There you go. You know how you're going to get that. So there's a wonderful feature in this program as well as other ones up here in the upper right called remove Ghosts. Who you gonna call? Yes, remove ghosts and what that does. And again, it's It's an amazing piece of technology where you're asking it. Would you take the detail from only one of these images, but take the tonal range from all of them to create my final output. In other words, because things are always gonna be moved their slightly out of registration. Ah, cars moving in your seen This idea of removed ghosts is pretty much essential for creating HD ours. The problem is, what do you when I go on, remove ghosts? Okay, it did do it, but I'm getting some blown out information here. And this is what you need to remember with removed ghosts. And this is for any program. You're going to tell it what file to use for the removing of the ghost. Or let me put it this way. What file has the complete tonal range in it? So I have this file with all my detail as the master and then I'll use the tone from all the other ones toe add to this one to supplement the tone, not the detail. So in this case, it starts off with this green rectangle around. Whatever is the main image it's going to use for detail, and you'll notice this is the one that had that blown out with the car headlight. Hence the situation where we have the blown out detail this one has detailed throughout Let's zoom back out so I could tell it to use this one for removing the ghost. And you can see now I'm having more detail in the highlights. But I'm getting this exaggerated cliff highlight, which I'm I like, but I'm not the biggest fan of it. I like that tone. But if I come over here to this last image here, actually, I can't because this one is the furthest out of registration of the other ones. So I probably am gonna have to go with one of these and then I'm going toe, you know, pull in detail through it, but you're gonna have to figure out by going through which one until you get the appropriate result that you want. Then you're going to say bit and complete toning in adobe camera. That's really is the benefit here because with these trillions of tones, potential trillions at your disposal, um, you're gonna be able to take what still is a limited tonal range will hit return, and it will immediately take them into Photoshopped. Bring all your images together, make a single flattened document that is at this huge bit depth, and then it's gonna open up the adobe camera Raw interface. It's also going toe turn this image when it has thes three files into a smart object. So when you do have a C archer disposal, it will be nondestructive. You go back and change it and find tune it manipulated any way you want. So once you have those tones at your disposal, you actually can do a lot. Get away with a lot of tone mapping. And, of course, we're gonna go in here. It goes right for clarity and saturation, extreme adjustments without getting weird banding and weird, solid, saturated areas. Absolutely. So you can see how I can take my foreground up. I can take my highlights. Those highlights are still there. I can take advantage of things like hs l. If I start getting too much, I take that down. And might those yellers air getting too much? I can come into hs l and say, Would you just take the saturation of the yellows and oranges down and bring them back into submission? Okay, If I wanted you, um, I can come up here and using my dodge and burn tools like we did before. I don't need toe look over my shoulder because I'm looking at it here. That's actually I like that hs l It's reset that default there, um, and go back in with our adjustment brush and come up here and maybe do a little bit of our exposure. Tap some areas of the cliff that we want to maybe pull out. Take advantage of things like that. Graduated, filter, Teoh, come, appear darken up that sky a little bit. You know that we'll pull the eye into the desert scene, but you get the idea that's actually creating this high bid death image to have access to these three different exposures. But that's up to you. Whether you manually combine them, humanity, combine. And then you're gonna rely on those things together or take advantage of auto align or whether you're just going to take a single exposure that has no potential of coasting and do your dodging and burning on that three different ways of skinning that total cat inside of a butcher shop. And you could help yourself with running auto align before that, merge to hdr toe, minimize some of those ghosts. But of course, auto lines never going to get rid of the people that are moving through the image or the cars or whatever changing about the scene right? And the other thing that it's variation on this theme is HDR. But image adjustments you've got hdr toning, which is another slight variation on, um, this process. And this gets us back to the HDR toning. That's kind of built into the original HDR pro. But, um, is has a Siris of presets that you may find, um, you know, interesting in terms of the ability to tone, map and image. Yes, other third party programs provide visual presets and let you one click jump to crazy grunge. Out of control colors are, you know. And then there's some that doing more subtle jobs. Yeah. Okay, so there is, you know, tone mapping. There was the resulting image in a different program