Need help with blending in CC

I am wanting some help with blending two images in Photoshop CC.
For example, there is a scene with a waterfall and some green foliage in the foreground. With the slow shutter, the foliage moves around and becomes blurred. I would like to be able to take two shots and blend them so that the waterfall is perfect, along with clear (non blurred) foliage that is not moving around during the long exposure.

Here is an example.

Here is a screen shot that I took while looking at a contact's flickr.

As long as you shoot on a tripod, it should be a fairly simple matter of layers and masks.

Damo77 wrote in post #17409448
As long as you shoot on a tripod, it should be a fairly simple matter of layers and masks.

I always shoot landscape on a tripod. But your response didn't really answer my "detailed walkthrough" request...which was the point of this thread.

I'm happy to give you a detailed walkthrough once you post your two photos.

Damo77 wrote in post #17409460
I'm happy to give you a detailed walkthrough once you post your two photos.

I'll hold you to that. Subscribe to this thread so you can get a notification when I post back here. Don't know how long it'll be before I am able to get out again for shooting.

Three pages on Layer Masks

Tons of videos on YouTube on this technique: https://www.youtube.co​m …+long+exposure+​layer+mask

I am not sure I understand how fixing shutter speed and changing ISO freezes any action. What is missing form the description is the assumption that, in changing ISO from 50 to 1600 (+5 stops) the shutter speed was decreased (made faster) by 5 stops (from 1 sec to 1/30s or so) to freeze the ferns and, through reciprocity, preserve the original exposure.

Let's assume that is the case.

When blending, there are several ways to achieve the composite. If presented with a situation, like yours, in which I did not shoot the source images, I try to figure out if there is a feature or characteristic of the elements that I need to mask that I can separate from their individual channels or differences.

Here, the luminosity of the water separates it from the rest of the scene. In particular, the red channel is likely a good candidate to give you the best contrast between the water (bright in all 3 RGB channels) and the green foliage (the red channel is the opposite of green, more or less, so the green foliage will be dark in the red, but still have detail - the blue channel might be as contrasty, but with poor detail). You may also get better mask refinement by using a curves adjustment or similar operation to control mask contrast.

Using the red channel of the "fern" exposure (with frozen motion of the ferns) as a grayscale image gives you a staring point for a mask that will reveal the water and reject the ferns, etc. You can paint on the mask to refine it. I often paint with a brush in OVERLAY mode - if you paint around edges with white, for example, it will lighten whitish areas that need more refinement toward white without lightening dark tones that need to stay dark. If you paint around edges with black, it will push darker grays that need to be black toward black without darkening light tones that need to stay light or white.

I would set the composite up like this:

> Image of soft water with blurry ferns on top of layer stack with MASK that is white where the water is, black where the ferns, etc are.
> Image of sharp, frozen ferns on bottom of stack

The mask is based on the RED channel of the frozen in place fern image, with painting onto the mask if appropriate.

kirk