For one of your underexposed photos, don’t worry about correcting for the shadows, since you’ll also be discarding that. You’ll be discarding that part of the photo later. For instance, in one of your overexposed photos, don’t worry about the white balance for the overblown highlights. It’s important to note that you only have to correct for colorcasts that are in properly exposed parts of each photo. Unfortunately, though, there can often be more. If you’re lucky, you’ll have no more than two light sources in the photo. What you’re going to do here is reprocess each photo so that you’ve corrected any colorcasts. Different light sources have different white balance settings though, so if you have a photo with two or more different light sources (such as the night sky and an artificial light), no matter how you adjust your settings, you’ll always have a color cast somewhere on your photo. White balance is a setting that keeps the whites in the image white, removing any colorcasts. Now you’ve got an image with three or more layers all ready to go, but we’re no quite ready to do the layer masking yet. Once you’re done processing each exposure, select them all, right click, and select “open as layers in Photoshop. I usually apply lens profile correction, remove chromatic aberration, and do a little noise reduction before bringing down the highlights a little bit and bringing up the shadows and whites a little bit. There’s no magical formula for processing here. Since you have multiple exposures, you don’t need to go crazy trying to recover lost highlights (overblown bright spots) and shadows (dark parts that look black), but you want to recover them a little bit to give you more leverage later on in the process. If you don’t have Lightroom, you can do this in Adobe Camera Raw. Process each exposure in Lightroom or Camera Raw, then open as layers in Photoshopįirst, you are going to process the photos for exposure only, ignoring white balance. Here you can see where just processing one RAW file wouldn’t be sufficient. Processing one of the RAW files in Lightroom. If you need to go past 30 seconds, go into bulb mode (consult your camera’s manual for how to find it), and use a remote trigger release, holding the shutter open as long as you want. It’s probably easiest to use manual mode, set your ISO to 100 or 200, stop down your aperture to f/7.1 or f/8 (if it’s really dark out, you can open it up wider), and then take a series of shots at increasingly slower shutter speeds until you’ve captured the range of light in the scene. You can use auto exposure bracketing to capture three images, but at night, exposures on the high end can often exceed 30 seconds, the longest shutter speed most cameras will let you shoot manually. A tripod is also necessary, since you’ll probably be taking these at night, and also because you won’t be using HDR software which aligns the images. It is really important to shoot in RAW, to get as much mileage out of each photo as possible. You need to shoot as many photos as it takes to capture the dynamic range (the range from light to dark) in the scene. Shoot three or more exposures on a tripod You can always try HDR software first, and if the colors don’t seem to bleed, you can skip down to the later part of the tutorial for dealing with the colorcasts.Īn image that required three exposures and had a color cast from the lamps. Here, you’ll be taking three or more photos and blending them manually, since HDR software often creates unpleasant artifacts and odd color blending when used in the type of situations presented in this tutorial. This method is a little different than HDR, which involves taking three or more photos at different exposures, then using automated software to combine them into one image that captures the range of light in the scene. Luckily, with multiple exposures and layer masking in Photoshop, you can create a photo that looks a lot like what you saw with your own eyes. These issues are compounded at night, when artificial lights inside buildings coupled with the darkness of the night sky create an especially contrasty image with an unattractive colorcast created by the different light sources. Unfortunately, however, it is often fraught with exposure and white balance issues. A challenging nighttime scene was overcome with multiple exposures and layer masking.īlending indoors and outdoors in architectural photography can often create a compelling image.
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