Blending two different exposures for low light shots
 

I took this picture of the Yaquina Bay (Oregon) lighthouse by blending two separate exposures. This is my second or third try with this technique, so I don't have it perfect yet, but this one turned out fairly well.

http://www.pbase.com/image/20896165/original.jpg

1) I took two shots using a tripod with the exposure 2 stops apart. One stop overexposed and one stop underexposed from the center-weighted meter reading.

2) In my photo editor, I opened the darker exposure and selected all and copied it to the clip board.

3) I closed the dark exposure and opened the lighter one, then created a new empty layer and pasted the dark picture from the clipboard into the new layer.

4) I created a Layer Mask in the new layer and then copy and pasted the lighter picture into the mask.

5) I adjusted the opacity of the Layer Mask to around 60% or so until I got a pleasing blending of both exposures. I wanted the foreground to have minimal detail, the shadows to have some detail, the sky to be blue and the lights to be soft.

Has anyone else had experience with this sort of thing?
What suggestions can you offer?

On the Experimenting with light... a lighthouse thread I attempted to combine good parts from three different photos into one.

I started out with the fifth picture as the base. Then I took the tenth picture and selected the sky portion and pasted it as a new layer and made it about 60% or so. I aligned the sky to match with the mountains as best I could (they were just slightly different) then returned it to full opacity. I used the brush tool to get rid of blurry mountain lines. Then I used the heal and smudge tools to stretch the light sky over the darker one. There was less light sky in the original paste than there is in the base photo. I rotated the third picture to be straight and selected the lighthouse and pasted that as a new layer. Then used heal and brush to fill in and match up the edges of the lighthouse to the rest of the picture.

I think if I were to attempt that again I wouldn't have used a soft edge heal around the lighthouse because it looks fuzzy now. Oh well.

The picture looks really good.

I'm failry new to these things, and I can't really grasp the idea of blending two images. Can you post one of the originals (the lighter or the darker) so I can see the change between them?

The thing is, if you posted this as an unmodified original, I would've believed it!

Sure. I'll post the original images when I get home this afternoon.
In the meantime, here is a tutorial on a similar technique with examples.
http://luminous-landscape.com/tutori...xposures.shtml :)

Here's pic #1:
http://www.pbase.com/image/20950307/original.jpg

And pic #2:
http://www.pbase.com/image/20950309/original.jpg

The final is about halfway inbetween in this case, but you can see if you compare to the "correct" exposure by the meter that the final image is a blending, not an average.
Here's the middle exposure:
http://www.pbase.com/image/20950793/original.jpg

Very cool. Thanks for the step-by-step. I'm going to give it a try.

Once again: nice blending, just the right contrast.

Good link too! Thanks

Very interesting, and even better, you explained how.

Kudos.

very interesting, i have never seen it before and i should try it

Cool. Thanks for the props. Now you can post yours. :)

The Biggest Candle in the World
 

Another example of blending two exposures for a night shot.

http://www.pbase.com/image/20984688/original.jpg

interesting effect.. quite clever..

Wow, you guys are really good at this. I sure need to take more photos and think about them this much! Nice work!

here's another one to try. Do a double exposure with 1 in focus and 1 way out of focus of the same thing. I'll try to find an example