Exposure Blending- Luminosity Masks and Smart Objects
It seems topics in photography ebb and flow often, and lately, I have received a lot of inquiries about exposure blending. My usual response is, “I don’t do it that often, so I’m afraid I can’t be much help.” While that may be true, it is a horrible response that is not helpful to anyone who asks. So, I called in a special guest to help us all out with exposure blending, Sean Bagshaw of Outdoor Exposure Photo.
For those of you who know Sean, you know that he is an eloquent educator with a real talent for explaining difficult topics in a way anyone can understand.
For those of you who may not know Sean, he uses the Tony Kuyper Luminosity masking panels and creates incredible education to go along with them. Sean is a legend in the photo education community, and it is an extreme pleasure to have him here on f.64 Academy to explain some of his exposure blending techniques.
Sean and I met at Out of Oregon in October and from day one we hit it off discussing all the nerdy things in Photoshop that we are passionate about. I will admit, I was a little intimidated by him when we first shook hands.
It’s kind of like meeting someone you have heard so many amazing things about, but when you get the chance to meet them face to face, you kind of freeze up. It didn’t take long, however, for us to dive into some heavy Photoshop conversation.
While we were in the car driving the Oregon Coast, Sean thought it would be an excellent idea if we could collaborate on a project. After deliberating on several topics, we came up with two that would be mutually beneficial to our audiences.
So today, on f.64 Academy, you get not one, but two excellent tutorials to spruce up your Friday morning. Sean will show you some of his Exposure Blending techniques on my channel, and I will be showing him some Color grading techniques on his channel. This collaboration was a lot of fun and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Sean will show you two exposure blending methods in this video. One is an effortless blend, and the second has a few more intricate details that need a more delicate hand with a Luminosity Mask and some Smart Objects. This one is great! Enjoy 🙂
For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
Loved this
Very cool! The explanation of how to fix areas that did not blend well enough is exactly what I needed to hear. I‘m gonna try that.
And there were also some much needed reminders about color grading with gradient fills 🙂
Thanks to both of you!
Thanks Blake & Sean for your awesome tips.Going to try how I can play around with exposure blending with color grading.
Also I understand Adobe in their 2020 update have added another cool stuff as Adobe Capture,wherein one can create patterns,shapes ,color themes and Gradient from the image one is editing and or from any image and save them into library.I kike the gradient and color themes .
What are our thoughts?Blake.
Blake … love the ideas here and am trying them on an image. On the color blend mode though, I can’t double click on the thumbnail and get to the color picker. I get a layer styles menu. I’m sure I’m doing something wrong.
Never mind … I was adding a regular layer of a color with a color blend mode. It has to be an adjustment layer. Way cool!
Thanks for the luminosity masking techniques and examples. I always learn from you and I respect and appreciate your work. You guys have far more expertise than I do and probably know this, but just as a comment for some of your viewers, the + method of creating a selection creates an 8 bit selection (in a 16 bit image in your examples) which is probably more than good enough for creating luminosity masks in most or all images, but could result in some banding in severe luminosity adjustment cases that you are trying to adjust once selected (I’m not sure that it will make any difference for a mask except maybe for the feathering created by the mask between different luminosity levels in the image). There are techniques for making 16 bit and even 32 bit selections posted on You Tube.
my comment somehow lost the “Ctrl + Click” statement where it only shows “+ method”