Tonight, let's talk about sunset shots. They can be very hard to get when you're shooting directly into the sun, as the shadows get very underexposed. In order to expose the sun correctly, you have to underexpose everything else. Sometimes, the silhouettes that are made are actually pretty wonderful, but a lot of the time you just get a super contrasty, rather saddening image.
On the other hand, you can over expose the sun and sky to get detail into the ground and shadows. However, the obvious problem with that is over exposing the sky and sun....
For the last couple years, the solution for that has been HDR programs like Photomatix Pro and even Photoshop. These work really well to do fast HDR images (although Ps makes 32bit HDR images that are great for editing later), but the results can be less than satisfactory. Ghosting and bad blending almost always occurs, and most of the time the images are way, way over done. This has given HDR a bad name, which is quite sad.
I used to be a big fan of slightly over processed HDRs, I'll admit. Half of the fun is just getting super crazy results! With a couple clicks, all this magic happens and your bracketed images suddenly merge into one super awesome....thing. It was fun for a while, but over time I found myself going away from that over processed look towards something more real.
I first discovered luminosity mask blending from the Patel's last spring. They marketed the process as iHDR, a process they created. Yes, they had their own work flow. But no, they didn't create luminosity masks and they weren't the only ones using it. There wasn't much information out there yet, and I wasn't at a point where I was ready to experiment with it. With the blog in full swing, I didn't have time to really figure out luminosity masks, so I kept putting it off for a few months.
The most common method of blending I was using before luminosity masks, was just layer masks. It's quick and easy to do, just paint where you want the image to show. With a little skilled a precise brush work, images can be blended quite well actually. It's not a bad method sometimes, but with areas like horizons and skies, it really doesn't work well. The transition zones become this weird gradient, and it's obvious that layers were blended.
With the down falls of only using layer masks, I shied away from shooting contrasty scenes. Forests in mid day light, or sunsets on beaches were mostly edited in Lightroom. It wasn't the worst way to edit, but it does induce noise and artifact by manipulating only one raw file.
Finally, with my final project last fall, I started using luminosity masks and install fell in love. The advantages are HUGE. In Lr, when you raise the shadows, you raise the shadows everywhere. Even in you use a local adjustment, you can't be very precise. But with luminosity masks, you can very, very precisely paint in layer masks. You can select only the shadows of one image, then paint in that selection from another image. In other words, you can select the totally crushed blacks from the underexposed sunset shot, and then paint in that area from your over exposed sky shot. By doing this, you're taking the best of both your images and combining them into one. There's no weird blending marks or gradients, it looks like it came from one image. Even better, you're not manipulating the original raw file, so image quality is not lost. The only down fall is that you have to have perfectly aligned images.
So back to the sunset shot I'm writing this post about....
I went out to South Beach when I was home over break, specifically to shoot sunsets and test out luminosity masks. I didn't have a very wide lens on me, so I was limited in what I could shoot. The shot I really wanted to make required a wider field of view than I had, so I had to look around a little more to find something I could shooting with the lens I had.
Note: Later I figure out how to make a panoramic HDR with luminosity mask to simulate a wider lens. That's coming up in a later post.
Eventually, I found this really awesome log that was getting hit my surf. When a big wave came, it crashes around the long, which I thought would look awesome with a long exposure to blur the water. Another reason I chose to shoot that log was the composition of it. By putting the camera lower down and shooting into the sun, the log made a line leading to some rocks, which then led to the sun, which then led to the clouds, then the water, then the log, etc. It just made a nice zig zag over the image. Wonderful. It was also a great way to test out luminosity masks.
I stopped down all the way to get a slow shutter speed to blur the water. Preferably, I would use an ND filter and shoot at f/11 or so, but I don't have an ND filter so f/22 would have to do. With that aperture and ISO100, my shutter speed for EV-0 was 1/4s. This overall gave good exposure, and would have been the exposure I could use just with Lr sliders to create an HDR image. But I wasn't doing that. I did a bracketed sequence of +/-1EV, so 1/8s and 1/2s. This got the sky exposed properly as well as the ground.
I made sure my setting were okay by looking at the histogram. With the -1EV, I wanted the information to be all the way right, but not clipped at the whites. This would give me the most information in the highlights. With the +1EV, I wanted the information as far left as possible, but not clipped on the blacks. This would give me the most information in the shadows. Granted, I could have done a greater range than +/-1EV and gotten more information in the highlights and shadows, but I've found 1 stop actually does a pretty darn good job at capture the full range of tones in a sunset. It's not as contrasty as full sunlight, so one stop works really well. And yes, Lr could easily pull out the information from one RAW file, but as the cost of image quality. With a full frame camera like the 5D mrkIII or the D810, maybe one file would do it, but maybe not with the 7D. Plus, I was experimenting with a new technique!
And, I actually just remembered this, with three exposure right after each other, I have three stages of waves to blend into the final image. You'll see in the final image how I blend all the waves together.
Another thing I forgot I did...Before I edited in Ps, I tried to compress the tonal range of the RAW files in Lr by lowering the highlights and raising the shadows of each. Yes, this goes against what I just said about not editing in Lr because it degrades the image....but, little adjustments don't have too much of an effect. It's more when you do major changes that things go bad. With doing the adjustments, blending goes much more smoothly.
Here are the three shots, originals then edited:
Starting in Photoshop, I make my luminosity channels off the dark layer. I use Jimmy McIntyre's action for creating the channels for the selections, which become the masks. He has an awesome action provided for free, so why not take advantage of it? He's also a great resource for learning advanced blending, I think one of the better pro's out there.
Anyway, once I had my mask, I selected the dark areas of the image, and then used that selection to paint in the light areas. It takes a bit of tweaking and I used a couple different selections for different areas, but it's a fairly straight forward process. I explain it more in the video below.
Then, after my images were blended, I working on my tones. With a couple of curves adjustments that altered different parts of the image, I got a much more dramatic image. Again, I got through that in more detail in the video.
Finally, I worked on colors, added vibrance in to different parts of the image at different levels. Just simple layer masks used there.
This video has a more detailed description of how I edited. Seeing is probably a little easier to grasp than me writing a bunch of tech jargon!
And finally, the image! As I said in the video, this image was shot and edited not based on a recipe, but on problem solving. HDR sticking software makes all the decisions for you, and the image suffers from that lack of creative input. It takes longer to do it yourself, but the results are so much better! Here's a comparison with one made in Photomatix and one with Lr.
Photomatix:
Lightroom:
Photoshop:
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