Manually+Blending+Images

=Manual Exposure Blending= Exposure blending is a simple photoshop technique that is becoming increasingly popular. It allows the photographer to exposure correctly for the shadows, mid-tones and highlights within the scene, without the use of ND filters or over the top HDR blending. Why fork out a small fortune on Lee filters when you could create similar, possibly better effects on your computer for free. Check out the image below, showing the blended photos and the final image. Manual Exposure blending - Images used and final image

1.) The key to this techniques is to exposure correctly for the mid-tones and highlights within the scene. This can be accomplished by simply bracketing your exposures by 1 or 2 stops. 2.) Once you have imported these photographs onto your computer, open the images in Photoshop. 3.) Select all of one image (Select > All) (“cmd + A on Mac”) and copy it (Edit > Copy). 4.) Then paste (Edit > Paste) this image onto a layer on top of the other one. Copy and paste one image on top of the other 5.) Create a new layer mask on the top image. Then select the brush tool, lower the opacity of the brush and burn through parts of the image on the layer below. This will allow you to blend the correctly exposed parts of both images. Blend the correctly exposed parts of both images 6.) This results in the final image as seen below. The final thing to do is to merge the layers and save the image as a Tiff or jpeg. Final image - manually exposure blended in Photoshop