3 QUICK TIPS
Þ Þ with the night sky exposure for initial editing and load both images in Adobe Lightroom. Here, you can make general changes to the overall ‘Exposure’, ‘Contrast’, ‘Whites’ balance and ‘Highlights’ and ‘Shadows’. Since the foreground exposure is drastically brighter than the sky exposure, bring down the ‘Exposure’ and ‘Highlights’ for the foreground image to mimic what a night exposure would generally look like; and bring up the ‘Exposure’ and ‘Shadows’ in the night sky shot to compensate for underexposure. Once both images have been adjusted in Lightroom, they can be loaded in
Adobe Photoshop for blending and final editing.
In this particular skyscape, the mountain range provides a hard line between the foreground and the sky, which makes it fairly simple to blend the two exposures. After layering both images, select the
Make sure your tripod is stable so that it does not move in between exposures.
1.
After using Photoshop’s ‘Quick Selection Tool’ to mask your foreground layer, invert the mask in order to create your sky layer to save time.
2.
Ensure the transition from foreground to sky looks as realistic as possible to mimic a night shot.
3.
foreground exposure and use the ‘Quick Selection Tool’ to outline the foreground below the mountain range. Zoom in to 100% to make final tweaks to the ‘marching ants selection’– the area selected by a moving dotted line – to ensure a proper mask and to create a new layer for this selection. Do the same with the sky layer by using the ‘Quick Selection Tool’ to select the sky above the mountain range and create a new layer for this selection too. Next, hide both the original layers leaving only the two new layers (see screenshot 1).
Use the ‘Move Tool’ to line up both foreground and sky layers; if you did a careful job with the ‘Quick Selection Tool’ both layers will be seamless. If not, you might see a white gap between them. At this point, you can go back and redo the layer masks or you can use the ‘Clone Stamp Tool’ to carefully remove any white gaps. To use the ‘Clone Stamp Tool’, zoom in to 100%, sample a portion of the sky close to the white gap and then brush over the gap; filling it in with the sky sample. Once complete, your sky and foreground will be seamless. However, the exposure difference between both layers may still make the overall image look unnatural, so a little more processing may be required.
Finishing touches
To adjust the foreground exposure, select your foreground layer and add both a ‘Brightness’ and a ‘Curves’ layer. Right click on each layer and select ‘Create Clipping Mask’, which will clip it to the foreground layer notated by the down arrow icon. Decrease the ‘Brightness’ and bring down the overall ‘Curves’ adjustment on each clipped layer until the overall exposure of your foreground matches the sky. You may lose shadow detail by doing this, so create a layer mask for both the ‘Brightness’ and ‘Curves’ layers. Select the layer mask and use a black paintbrush to ‘undo’ or paint back in the details until you are satisfied with how both combined exposures look (see Screenshot 2).
From here, you are free to add final touches to your post-processing to suit your needs, which may consist of additional ‘Contrast’, using the ‘Dodge’ and ‘Burn’ tools to lighten and darken the image, noise removal (to remove unwanted artefacts), final sharpening, colour correction, ‘Vibrance’ and ‘Saturation’, plus any final cleanup work such as removing hot pixels or sensor spots.