How to exposure blend a landscape – N-Photo 155 video tutorial

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If you’re into landscape photography then you’ve probably heard of HDR imaging. This involves using software to blend a set of bracketed frames into a single image with a high dynamic range, which essentially allows us to display detail in very bright and very dark areas. It’s especially useful for sunrise and sunset landscapes because the sky is usually so much brighter than the land, so recording a balanced exposure without resorting to HDR can be a challenge.

However, there is a second option that’s perhaps less practiced, but potentially more effective. Luminosity Masking is similar to HDR in that it lets us blend bright and dark frames, but it’s more of a manual process of layering and masking images in Adobe Photoshop CC, using the luminosity of different areas to create seamless blends. It has a steeper learning curve than HDR, but with greater control comes results that are often less overcooked and more nuanced. With our landscape here, it’s a clear winner. But for other scenes it might not be as obvious. Over the next few pages we’ll look at the two techniques.

Both HDR and Luminosity Masking are different forms of exposure blending, so we need more than one exposure to work with. This is where bracketing comes in. But there’s more to it than engaging your camera’s bracketing feature. So we’ll begin here by taking an in-depth look at bracketing – how to set it up, which exposure settings to vary and how many frames you need to shoot. From here we’ll go over the basics of Luminosity Masking and HDR. We’ve supplied a set of Luminosity Masking actions among the project files.

The lead technique writer on Digital Camera Magazine, PhotoPlus: The Canon Magazine and N-Photo: The Nikon Magazine, James is a fantastic general practice photographer with an enviable array of skills across every genre of photography.

Whether it's flash photography techniques like stroboscopic portraits, astrophotography projects like photographing the Northern Lights, or turning sound into art by making paint dance on a set of speakers, James' tutorials and projects are as creative as they are enjoyable.

He's also a wizard at the dark arts of Photoshop, Lightroom and Affinity Photo, and is capable of some genuine black magic in the digital darkroom, making him one of the leading authorities on photo editing software and techniques.

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