Shoot towards the sun and capture gorgeous backlit portraits
Create balanced landscapes by blending two different exposures with simple Photoshop Elements skills, explains James Paterson
Many of the amazing landscape photos that we aspire to emulate aren’t a photograph at all. Instead they’re a combination of two or more images, shot at different exposure settings to capture detail at either end of the tonal range, then blended together to form a seamless whole. This is done to retain detail in the sky, as it’s usually brighter than the land. By taking one frame with a wellexposed foreground and one for the brighter sky, we can blend the two later for a balanced scene.
The technique for this begins in-camera, as you have to take two or more frames in perfect alignment, so a tripod is essential. It’s also a good idea to use a cable release and engage your camera’s bracketing mode, so that there’s no need to touch the camera between frames. If you don’t intend to blend the frames later, bracketing is a useful method for landscape photography as it gives you a safety net if the exposure setting isn’t quite right.
Once we have our separate exposures, we can use simple blending skills in Photoshop to combine the best parts of each. We do this by creating layer masks to hide or reveal the areas that we want. Sometimes exposure blending can easily be done by painting masks freehand. We’ve made it hard for ourselves and shot a tree. Because of all the jagged branches and fine detail it’s an intricate object and therefore tricky to isolate. With the Refine Edge command in Photoshop Elements, however, we can create a precise, detailed selection of the object. Once done, we can fine-tune the mask before dodging and burning our landscape.