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When shooting towards the sun at sunset it can be tricky to record a balanced exposure. If we expose for the sky the land looks too dark, but if we expose for the land the sky can blow out. At times like this it’s usually worth shooting a bracketed sequence of exposures (in which the camera will take under and overexposed frames alongside the ‘correct’ exposure). This way, you have several options. You can pick the best exposure from the bunch, or merge the set to an HDR image, or manually blend the exposures later on. The last option usually involves opening two or more images into your editing software then masking one image to blend it with another. This is where Live Masking in Affinity Photo can prove very useful.
There are three different kinds of Live Masks in Affinity Photo – Hue, Luminosity and Band-pass. They allow us to blend a layer with the layers below based on a set of parameters. Luminosity – which we’ve used here – lets us blend based on the lightness values of pixels. Effectively, it gives us a fine degree of control over blending light pixels on one layer with darker pixels on another, or vice-versa. As such, it’s very useful for exposure blending, as we can fill in an overexposed sky with a correctly exposed one in seconds.
Many of us will have lots of bracketed sets faithfully saved on our hard drives to try out this technique. So open up a couple of images and give it a go... and get blending those exposures with this easy technique.
Download the project file(s) to your Downloads folder
