online photo tutorials

The concept behind this tutorial is simple. To use this technique, you must manually adjust the various “zones” of an image to your liking. For example, if the ground is too dark, you brighten the ground. If the sky is too bright, you darken the areas that need editing. This is much preferable to something like High Dynamic Range plugins or software that use “Tone Mapping”, which don’t allow you to adjust the individual areas.

See a higher resolution version of the final image here.

The key to proper exposure is to expose as much as you can before “blowing” the highlights. This means to make the image as bright as possible until your image has areas that are pure white. Most cameras will display this with a “highlights” feature, where areas on the screen will flash or blink. Take the photo one third of a stop lower than the exposure which gives you “blown highlights”, then follow this tutorial.

You only need one photo for this, preferably a raw image. You don’t need to bracket or anything else - this is a much simpler, more controllable technique than using “High Dynamic Range” programs.

The image above is the image as it appears straight out of the raw converter, without any changes. Feel free to download the .NEF and .XMP file here so you can follow along. The first step is to compensate for the shadows of the ground in Adobe Camera RAW. To do this, I used a “Fill Light” setting of 30. I adjusted the “Highlights Recovery” all the way to 100 to give the clouds and sky a darker appearance. If you did not shoot in Raw mode, you can use the “Highlights / Shadows” tool for the same effect - brighten the shadows in replace for “Fill Light”, and darken the highlights to replace the “Recovery” edit.

Critical analysis of this image shows there are two parts - the sky and the ground, or the areas that need brightening and the areas that need darkening. If we reduce the image to these two simple groups, it is easy to understand what needs to be edited, and how.

Now that we understand the areas that need to be processed, you must go about setting the brightness of each individual area. To do this, create a new Levels layer adjustment [under Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels], and determine the “white point” and black point of the given area. This isn’t always applicable - in the sky, for example, there is no “black point”. If you cannot determine a good black or white point, simply drag the sliders until you have the desired effect.

Remember, only look at the given area you are processing. If you are editing the ground, don’t bother about the sky as the edits you make will not effect this area in the end result. For the white point below, I used the bright Daisy flowers in the foreground. For the black point, I used a shadow in the tree line at the back.

Setting the white and black point as such blew the sky out - however, this was easy to correct. Using a soft, round brush on the levels adjustment layer’s mask erased the layer’s effect on the sky, returning it to the original muted highlights.

Next I repeated the process. However, this time I wanted to darken the sky - so I created a levels layer adjustment layer that darkened the overall image, then masked it off so that it only effected the sky’s brightness levels. This provided a subtle effect on the photo.

This technique can be used to change the appearance of individual areas of the photo. For example, I thought that the blues in the sky at the top left were too saturated and unnatural. I created a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and turned saturation down to -15. Then, I masked it off so it only applied to the top left section. This left the top left section with less saturation, while the rest of the image was just as vivid.

If you have any questions on this tutorial, feel free to leave them in the comments! Also, if you’ve read this far, consider Digging this post.

This post is tagged HDR, photomatix, photoshop tutorials, tone mapping