About a month ago or so I posted an entry about a portrait shoot on the Beaverkill. As promised in that post I said I would explain how I did a composite of one of the photos of the kids. Well….as promised here is the step-by-step instructions on how I combined 3 different exposures of the same photo.
Here is the final image that was delivered to my clients. This shot is made up of 3 different exposures. First is the kids and field in the foreground. Second is the large hill in the back. And third is the sky. Also a large telephone pole was removed from the shot. |
| 1. Raw file: this is the raw exposure straight out of the camera. I normally would have deleted this from the set of edited photos. It was actually a test shot to check for proper exposure. But the poses were so cute I couldn’t pass this one by. You can see this test shot was way underexposed in the foreground. However since I shot this in RAW format and on a D700 I was able to pull all the detail I needed out of the shot without it getting noisy or grainy. Again, normally I wouldn’t have spent this much time on one photo if it weren’t so priceless.
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| Step 1: Expose for the sky. This first shot is only to expose for the sky. We don’t care about the rest of the photo. I brought the expose down in Photoshop to bring out the colors in the sky.
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| Step 2: Expose for the hill in the background. Again in this shot the kids are too dark and now the sky is way too bring. However, the background in how we need it.
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| Step 3: Expose the kids and field correctly. Now the kids look great and the hill and sky are way too bright.
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| Step 4: Combining the sky with the properly exposed hill.
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| Step 5: Combine the last shot with the properly exposed shot of the kids.
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| Step 6: Final shot. Now we have a great exposure of what the scene looked like to the eye. Only one thing. That horrible telephone pole. Remove that and here it is. The clients were very happy with the final shot. I could have left the sky less dramatic, however I went for the dramatic sky since that’s what I saw in the sky at the time:
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