Exposure Blend useing luminosity masks

Hi...This is a shot I took last year in Ordesa, Huesca, Spain. It´s a blend of 3 raw files useing luminosity masks in CS5, I prefer this method over tonemapping because I think it gives more natural looking results.

Thanks for looking....

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …marcodemalaga/6​190403432/

Great Technique!

Great looking image!

Want to write up a how-to?

Al

Intriguing image. Nice detail. I'm not sure I prefer the darker center to an overall lightening from tonemapping but then you don't have to deal with all the other artifacting that goes with it.

i too would like to hear just how you did this.

Thanks....Here´s the tutorial I used showing how to blend exposures useing luminosity masks
http://www.youtube.com​/watch?v=2FEqsWqG0Hg

and here´s my layers in Photoshop, as you can see I didn´t follow the tutorial exactly.

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Thanks, Mark

OMG! You just cut my processing time in half. Maybe more. I haven't been this excited since I saw my first peep show! Scratch that. I'm more excited now.

Jon...I´m glad you liked it, I think it´s a great technique too. I never use HDR programs now.
This is another shot I used it on which came out much better than tonemapping.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …marcodemalaga/5​872520294/

Great shot Mark!

I've been playing with this since you posted and have found that it works well on some images and not so well on others. Even between your two images, it worked better on the second than the OP IMO. I haven't yet figured out why on some and not others, but even the ones it doesn't work as well on it's still helpful. Being able to select via luminocity is huge!

Just wondering is there a way to set the amount of light it's using? Also, is there a way to select the opposite, IE, the darks?

Take a look at his advance guide to Luminosity masks. I think it will answer your questions Jon.

http://www.youtube.com …or7373#p/u/11/k​P4r1o7RWVY

Nice shots. Thanks guys for the links. I had tried this before but forgot how to do it and when I upgraded my computer, I lost the original bookmark.

This manual approach is similar to the exposure blending techniques that are automated by Enfuse and Zero Noise. Often these techniques will yield better results than straight up 32 bit merge and tone mapping where you have artifacts caused by halos (like the uniform sky next to agree line or building edge) or you have a small area of very high luminance throwing off the tone mapping compression.

Nicely executed manual blending in these posted examples.

Kirk

Thanks Kirk I´m glad you liked the examples. That Zero Noise program seems really interesting, I had a look at it a while back but could never get it to work on my windows vista. It´s a great idea blending the raw data. Did you get it to work ? the development of Zero Noise seems to have died a death I´ve not seen anything about it in a long time.

Mark

Here's an oldie but still relevant regarding Zero Noise:

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=775795

Here's an older thread with some ZN examples:

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=765354

And have a look through this thread:

https://photography-on-the.net …ghlight=zero+no​ise&page=2

I know Guillermo's goal, at one time, was to develop a ZN version that wrote to DNG, butI'm not sure how that plan may or may not have changed. I really like Zero Noise and, after brute forcing my way through the earlier versions, Guillermo helped me with the concept, the workflow and the output processing. One thing that is really important is understanding what Zero Noise produces as output. It is a 16 bit tiff, but the pixel values are scaled in lightness to the darkest exposure in the image set that you feed into it. Thus, the output always looks really dark and people sometimes get confused and give up. However, the file it produces can be heavily manipulated in PS and pushing the shadow tones up into the mid to three quarter tones is perfectly expected, and noise is not an issue - the exact intent of the approach.

There is an application that does a few different computational imaging things, like super-resolution, focus stacking and dynamic range extension - the application is called PhotoAcute studio:

http://www.photoacute.​com/

You can merge several exposures akin to HDR merge and export the file as a DNG, yielding better DR and less noise in the shadow tones, and ready for processing in your raw workflow of choice. Noise is also reduced in this approach, by replacing the noisy underexposed pixels with the well exposed pixels in the higher exposures.

Kirk

Great examples Mark!