Tutorial: Blending in Photoshop

Just a tuto­r­ial (err very rushed..) on blend­ing images in Pho­to­shop. I occa­sion­ally use this in my work­flow as it’s a handy way of fix­ing over expo­sures or increas­ing dynamic range with­out resort­ing to hdr.

The two images below will be blended for the pur­pose of this tuto­r­ial. I like the expo­sure of the land in the first shot but the sky has been over exposed. This can be fixed through blend­ing the sky of a darker expo­sure into the shot.

Assum­ing you have two brack­eted expo­sures (one darker and one a lit­tle lighter) that you wish to com­bine, begin by open­ing the brighter image in Pho­to­shop. Once open, select the image by press­ing Con­trol + A and then copy this selec­tion by press­ing Con­trol + C.

Now open your dark expo­sure in Pho­to­shop and paste the bright expo­sure which we just copied over the dark image by press­ing Con­trol + V. You should now have two lay­ers sim­i­lar to below.

You now need to cre­ate a layer mask to begin blend­ing your image. With your brighter layer selected, cre­ate a layer mask by click­ing the but­ton in the image below.

Your layer should now have a beau­ti­ful white box next to it..

Ok this is where the action begins.

I’ve now gone ahead and painted over the sky of the bright image. This has allowed me to revert back to the darker sky whilst keep­ing the more brighter expo­sure of the land.

This is the final product..

I’m sorry this is quite rushed as I wasn’t sure whether peo­ple would actu­ally be inter­ested. But I hope it helped some­one as it’s a sim­ple trick.