Luminous Fairyland (+RP)
by Jared Warren
I snuck in a quick visit to Bryce a couple days ago while traveling with family. This image was made about 30 minutes after sunrise. I was trying to capture the beautiful reflected light, but was also intrigued by the small evergreen trying to make a life for itself on top of this inhospitable hoodoo.
5Diii, 70-200 2.8ii @ 70mm, 4 images at f/8.0, 1/100 sec.
It's a 4-image blend for dof, but the blending gave me fits. Here's where I could use some instruction/advice, being a novice at exposure blending. I believe due to focus breathing(?), the transition between foreground (foliage in LLC, particularly) and the subsequent layer left a blurry space that I didn't know what to do with. I first tried content-aware fill to fix those spaces, but didn't have much success with that. I ended up using a bunch of cloning/healing circles in lightroom to try to smooth the transition, but in a larger print this could look like an amateur effort (which it is) to a trained eye. Any suggestions on how to deal with this in the future? Similarly, if anyone has a favorite source of instruction for learning exposure blending in photoshop I'd appreciate suggestions. Thanks for looking.
Comments
20 commentsGreat vertical comp.
I'm just starting out with blending, so I'll learn more from this thread than I will be able to contribute. My thought is that if the areas in question are sharp in one of the four captures, it might be possible to blend them back in manually using layer masks.
Re: blending. What is your field technique for capturing images with different focal points? Was it windy, causing the foliage to move between exposures? How are you combining them? Do any of the images have that area sharp (as Roger noted)? If not, then you might be out of luck. Still, I did not see anything untoward in the larger version.
Hmmm...probably much better off doing all of your 'healing' work in PS where you can incorporate layers and layer masks.
the light looks sweet and lovely
John, my focusing procedure was to leave focal length untouched (70mm) for each capture, and used liveview x10 with manual focusing starting with the nearest focal point (foliage in LLC) and worked my way back (rocks in LRC, main hoodoos in center, and background hoodoos). What I found though was that when focused on the foreground foliage, slightly less of the foliage was captured in the frame than when progressively focusing on the points deeper/further in the scene. Wind wasn't really an issue. I exported the 4 images from lightroom into photoshop together as layers, and starting with the foreground (foliage) as the top layer used layer masks to reveal just the in-focus foliage (then rocks in LRC, center hoodoos, etc.). But, for the transition area between the foreground foliage and base of hoodoo behind, I had to choose between the hoodoo layer that had OOF leaves or the foliage layer that had OOF base of hoodoo. Sorry, this is hard to explain. I'll try to attach samples of two of the layers to show the effect of what I assume was focus breathing with this lens.
First, in PS select all of the layers in the layer stack (Ctrl-click each layer).
Next, Edit->Auto-Align Layers. This will reconcile the differences in image perspective from changing focus (the focus breathing you refer to?). This may well leave small empty areas along the sides of the image which you'll need to crop.
Next, Edit->Auto-Blend Layers. Choose 'Stack Images' and then let PS do it's magic in blending those images to show the sharpest pixels.
Man, I've got a lot of learning to do in PS. I've used Lightroom for almost all post-processing, and have been intimidated by photoshop, but I guess it's time I got over that.
That book is a great way to get started using PS, and it sounds like you have a good grasp of layers and layer masks, so you're relatively most of the way there already. Google and the knowledgeable folks here at the Digital Imaging forum will be your best resource from here on out. Capturing great images like this are 90% of the answer, though.
Nick Bristol
Lone Rock, WI