Image blending

I have a shot that was taken in RAW (thank goodness) and the background is exposed correctly. However, the foreground is too dark but still light enough to have captured the detail etc. Not everything is lost! I now have two images that I made from the original file, one with the background exposed correctly and one with the foreground the way I expected (must have had the flash set too low).

Right now I have them both in photoshop CS2 as 2 seperate layers in one image and am deleting the area of the image with the dark foreground to correct this. So far this is looking really good but very difficult around a Woman's hair.

Is there an easier way to get the best of the two in one image?

I hope you are using a layer mask and not the eraser... or worse yet, the delete key.

If it's fly-away hair, get ready for some painstaking work. Or, give the person a haircut.

-Julie

Here's a tip that should help.

So, you have two images loaded on different layers. Click on the layer that has the background blown out (exposed for foreground). You want the one with the background blown out... because we're going to use the WHITE areas to show detail in the other layer (that's not blown out)... you'll see.

Switch to the channels palette and click on one of the channels... the one that offers the most contrast between foreground and background.
CTRL+Click on the channel to load it as a selection.
Click on the RGB channel (to reset the view back to colour), then switch to the layers palette again.

Add a mask to your top layer... which will use your selection (which is based on the image data).
It might end up backwards depending on which image you put on top. If so, just click on the mask and hit CTRL+I to invert it.

Consider that a starting point.... it should help around very detailed areas... not perfect, but you'll be able to go in with a paintbrush (on the mask) and correct it by painting with white and black.
If you screw up (big time) then you can always just delete the mask, load the channel again... and start over.... it's always there. Just make sure you have the right layer selected first.

NEVER use the erase tool (unless you can't avoid it).

Hit shift-option-command-tilde (~) (on a mac) or shift-ctrl-alt-tilde (I think, on PC). This loads a selection. Invert the selection and feather it. Use this selection to as a mask on the light layer. It will only lighten the darker parts. Use levels on the mask to adjust to taste. Quicktime movie explaining it in detail