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Lesson Info

Exposure Bracketing and Photo Stacking

All right, let's look at some of what I would consider to be photographers, essentials, things that I think it's better Photographer should know, but might not know. You know, there's a lot of photographers, essentials that everybody knows, and so you don't have to get into miss much. But let's take a look. Here's one. Some has one amount shooting. I find that I can't get everything in sharp. In part of that reason might be that, uh, I have something very close to my camera in something really far away. Anytime you get something close to your camera, you get, um, or limited depth of field, especially if you focus on what's close. So here's an example. In this case, I'm in Amboy, California, where there is an old gas station in Motel. And here I'm shooting through a broken pane of glass, and I want to use that to frame my subject, which is in the distance. And in this case, if I focus on the sign back here, the glasses not in focus. And if I focused on the glass, I obviously don't get t...

he sign. Uh, I can attempt to get them both, but in this case, I'm shooting hand held and I have something very close to the camera. So we're already keep my shutter speeds in the range. That is is good. I wasn't able to get in both and keep a really nice sharp picture. So what ended up doing is I prepped myself by focusing on the glass first, then focusing on the sign just to get my hand to be used to how far I'm gonna need to move the focus ring to switch between those two focus points. And then I focused on the glass. Click the shutter in quickly. Turnley focus Ring to focus on the distant object and click it again. And here's how it combined the two together to get both in focus. So I'm gonna select both of these images and bridge holding the shift key to get 2nd 1 and Enbridge. If you want to do something where you send your image to photo shop and do something special, you'll need to go to the Tools menu. Under the Tools menu will be a choice called Photo Shop, and that's why you'll find a list of things you could do with your image in this case. What I want to do is have Photoshopped stack these images as separate layers, and so there's a choice in here called load files into photo shop players. So that's tools Photoshopped load files into fighter shop players, and so you're gonna end up with one layer for each image. If he had 10 images, you have 10 layers here. I have two images, so I'm gonna end up with two layers now. Why? While it's doing that, I should let you know you could do the same thing in light room. It's just the name of the menu you go to would be different If you want to do this in Adobe Light Room, you would still select your images, but you would go to the photo menu at the top of your screen. And that's where you'll find a choice called Edit in and they'll be choices for photo shopped there, one of which should be called something like load files into funder shop players. And that's true of anything. I go up and choose from the tools Photoshopped menu Enbridge. If you want to access the same functionality from light room, you want to go to the photo menu. Choose, edit in and you'll find the same functions. Sometimes the wording is different in light room. That's because sometimes the wording in light room is more user friendly. For instance, if I am in bridge and I go to the tools menu and choose Futter shop, which one do you use to stitch a panorama? If you've already done it before, it might. You might know what it ISS, but if you've never stitched a panorama before, you have to look through this menu and you might not be sure to stitch a panorama. Use photo merge. But that could easily mean something else. You could do something else in light room. It would have a different wording. I remember what it is, but it might say something like Stitch, Panorama and Photo Shop or something like that, and it sends you to the photo emerge Command, you know, I mean, it's so the wording could be different if you're trying to be a little more user friendly, where his photo shop they came up with a terminology a long time ago, and they're just trying to leave it the same so that people that are already used to it, confined it. So after loading files of Photoshopped layers, I get two layers here, and I need to get all those layers selected so the top layer is already selected. I'll hold the shift key and click on the bottom layer. We haven't both selected, and you can do this with more than two shots. You can have 35 10 Minis he need. Just get him all selected. Then I'm gonna go to the edit menu, And that's where I'm gonna find a choice called auto Blend layers. That's auto blend layers from the edit menu. When I choose on a blend layers this comes up. Auto blend layers is used behind the scenes when a panorama is stitched. It's what makes it a seamless panorama in that you can't see where one photo ends in the next one begins, and the top setting would work if you're manually stitching a panorama. The other thing that auto blend layers it's good with working with is if the contents of the layers have the same subject matter in the same composition, and what's different about them is either the exposure, the focus point or something else, but the actual composition and subject matter is identical, and it will figure that out for you. All it does is it looks and sees to these layers. Are they perfectly stacked on top of each other? So it'll use the bottom setting. Or do they partially overlap? Is if you've moved them with the move tools so that go and partially overlap, like your manually stitching a panorama? And if you had done that, it would automatically choose the top. So all I'm gonna do in here is use default settings, and it will automatically choose the ones that are needed. Don't click OK, now, when I do that, what photo shop is doing is it's comparing the two layers, and it's looking at how much contrast is in the two layers, and it's going to use whichever layer. It has the most contrast, but it doesn't look. Do it. It's the images, a whole. Instead, it looks at each little bitty region of the image, comparing the two layers and saying which one has more contrast and it will use whichever that IHS. It happens to be that in the area that's in focus, always has more contrast than an area that's out of focus. So, in essence, it will compare the two layers and see which one of the two layers is more in focus and will use it. If I turn off the top layer, you'll see it used this much of the bottom layer, and then we used this much of the top layer. But not only that, if the exposure was a little bit off, he also made sure that it matched so that you wouldn't see a weird edge. So let's zoom up on this and see what we got. Get to a even percentage there. All right, so now I'm gonna choose, undo and let's see the difference and that really nice. It's kind of crazy that it could do it with that little of input from you, and we can do this with a bunch of different shots. The main thing is, you have to make sure you have enough pictures, so let me show you an example where I don't have enough here. I have two shots, and if you look at him individually, this one again of the iguana in the front and focus with Schattman, Galapagos Islands on this one of the backs out of focus notice. The area in the middle is also out of focus. If you look at the second shot, got the guy in the back and focus. But the area in the middle is still not in focus, which means in both photographs the area in the middle is out of focus. That's gonna be our problem. So if I take these two images and I choose load files into Photoshopped layers and wait for to finish, the problem we're gonna run into here is again. I was shooting hand held, but I wasn't as good at doing it, meaning when I did the previous image, I held really still, and I already had practiced where the to focus spots would be, so I could just click the shutter very quickly. Spend the focus style to the other settings and click again here. If you compare the two when I hide the top layer, you'll see that the position of these iguanas shifts as I turn this top layer off. So I'll do that. Now look at the guy in the back, so if I use auto blend layers right now, it's not gonna do a great job because they don't align, so we didn't do something to get them to a line. There are many different techniques you could use to do that, and there is one that's automatic. It's called auto Align Layers, but that wouldn't work great here because if you look at the iguana in the distance and you compare it to this one, visually, they look pretty different because that one's out of focus on one sharp. If they were both sharp and they're out of position, it would be able to line them up. But when ones that far out of focus and the other is that for in focus, the Ottawa line layers isn't quite going to do it for us. So what we could do is this. I could lower the opacity of the top layer so you can see through it to what's underneath. So I just click on the word opacity at the top of my layers panel A. Lower it down and I could start to see the other quantity. You see him there, then I'll use the move tool to reposition this layer to try to get the iguanas head to be in a consistent position. It doesn't have to be absolutely precise. As long as it's close, it will be able to usually do it. Then I'm gonna take the opacity in, turn it back up to 100 because I only had it turned down so I can see how it aligned. Now let's go through the same process we did on the previous image. I'm going to select both layers by holding shift looking the bottom layer. I'll go to the edit menu and will choose auto blend layers in. This is one instance when it could get confused because I moved that layer and it could automatically choose the Panorama mode if I moved it enough that it thought I was manually putting together a panorama. So I just want to glance at the settings and make sure it chose the right one. Seamless tones and colors is the thing that's going to make sure the exposures match, even if they were off a little bit. So I make sure that's on. So I'm just glancing to confirm that it picked the right defaults and I'll click OK, but with this one, the end result isn't gonna look like it could have been a real photo, because look at the area in between the two iguanas. I don't know how to make a far object in a near object sharp without getting the area between the two sharp. Right? So that means if you are going to do this a lot, make sure you're looking at your images and making sure capturing that, cause I'd have to go back to the Galapagos to recapture this thing. And, you know, it would have been nice that I done that. To be honest, I took this photo before this feature existed, so I just happened, looked through my images for examples that might work. So the closer you get something to your lens or the more you magnify something the narrow your depth of field is gonna be, and therefore the more shots you'll need to take in order to get the full depth in a scene. So as you do that, start adding more and more pictures where you focus a little bit further back, take a shot a little bit further back, take another shot and then finally to that far object and take the shot to make sure you get all of those. If you're doing extreme close ups or extreme magnification, the most extreme example of that that I can think of would be if you're shooting with your camera. Tash, no microscope. In that case, you might need 30 shots to get the full depth that might be in a shot, because in a microscope, you have next to no depth of field, huh? But that's what it's gonna look like now. One other thing about this is sometimes you're gonna think that you have really weird stuff in your end result, and I can see it one spot on this image if I zoom up not on my picture and photo shop but on my screen. I mean, I'm not gonna take command. Plus two, have Photoshopped enlarge the image. I'm gonna use my operating system to zoom up. Do you see a weird little almost looks like a little worm going through here. You see that there's another one right here. Those can also show up after stitching a panorama. You can see these weird lines. They're not actually in your file. It's just an artifact of how Photoshopped is trying to display your image. What's happening is you have two layers and you're not viewing them at full sides. You're not viewing it 100% view, and so it needs to scale down the picture to show it, show the whole thing on your screen and to do it quickly. It's scaling down the two layers individually and then putting the two together to show you what it looks like. If it would have first merged the layers together and then the scale down your view of it, that wouldn't show up. And if that makes any sense to you, But all it means is right now all I need to do to get him to go away has merged these two layers together. And so I'm gonna type of keyboard shortcut, usually just go up to the menu and choose merged layers or flatten image and go away. But since we're zoomed up, I can't get to that menu. I believe the keyboard shortcut for merge down is Command E, and hopefully that will work to merged layers. Watch that little worm like line you can see in here. You see it go away. If you were to a view zoomed up to 100% view. You wouldn't have seen it either. And so just know it's an artifact of how photo shops displaying the image. It's not truly part of your picture. If you were to print, it would look fine. If you zoomed up to 100% it would look fine in to get him to go away. Simply merged layers together. Then of any view. They look fine, and I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but some people might be wondering, How do I zoom up on my screen? Because, you know, sometimes I say about to click a icon and I just zoom up and show it to you. That's something that's built into the Macintosh interface, and I use it all the time. When I'm teaching, you need to be in one of the newer versions of the operating system. It can be a really old version, and what you do is you hold down the control key in on this little keyboard overlay that happens on my screen control key. Looks like this. A little up pointing triangle on the overlay. Then you use if you have a mouse slip with a little wheel on it. Use the wheel and you'll zoom in and out. If instead you have a track pad like would be in a laptop, used two fingers on that move straight up and down. So if you have a wheel on your mouse, use the wheel. If you have a laptop of the track pad, used two fingers on it, and then you'll be able to come over here and zoom up on any interface element that you care. Teoh. Think about and then you can zoom back out by just scrolling the opposite direction, okay?