Thursday, April 24, 2008

Photoshop: Masking and Expsoure

Masking is a very good tool to have under your belt, why? Because it gives you the opportunity to change only a specific area of the image, and that are can be decided buy yourself.

Masking has got to be one of the most powerful tools in Photoshop, for the reasons stated above. There are several ways of masking.

Instead of typing up a tutorial i decided to make a lot easier for both parties both for me and for you the reader. So i found this great video tutorial on YouTube. Its a series of three videos and well worth the total of 15minutes to watch, and which you can later on just go back to and review them again when you want to apply the tool, you will always be able to find the videos here!







One last comment or tip. Maybe some of you out there do not know this but when photographing the sunset its quite useful to decrease the exposure on your camera if possible, the reason for this is that you will render a slightly darker image, but the colors of the sunset will appear much more intense then they would be. Another great feature of decreasing the exposure is that you will render silhouettes in your images!

Knowing how to mask and knowing how to take great photos of the sunset you can combine two photographs one of a lower exposure where you get to see the beautiful colors of the sky and another image with a normal exposure of 0 for example. Now there is not a perfect exposure to use for sunsets but i find myself jumping between -0.3 to -0.7 and even to -1 sometimes to achieve the desired effect!

Here is a photograph where i combined two photographs, the first image (which i was going to use for a background) was shot with an exposure of -1 then i shot another image so i could show the detail in the gumboots at an exposure of -.3. And with the help of masking i combined these two images into a lovely final image.

Note that horizon is a bit tilted, i need to work on my straightening skills. That might be my next tutorial!


Rubber sunset


Have a great evening, Ciao

2 comments:

TF said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
TF said...

Thanks for the great article! Very comprehensive, will definitely try it later! Hope to see more articles from you!

Have a gd day