Layer Masks

Good morning,

So a while back I went hiking with my daughters in Zion National Park, we completed the Canyon Overlook Trail. Impressive for a 5 and 7 year old. While looking over the Canyon I noticed the road and thought to myself “that would make a great night shot with car trails.” Since then I have seen pictures of it on photo sharing sites, and my first thought was “damnit I was going to do that.” In October I went camping and got a chance to take one myself. I feel that it turned out pretty decent.

It was a near full moon so the canyon was visible except where the shadow was.

So I went up there with my friend Drew. Sadly I forgot my remote so I was left with 30 second exposures with a self timer. Not exactly what I wanted but it worked. Around 40 pictures were taken and the cars were not cooperating. With the bright moon and about an hour of shooting the shadow of the mountain had moved from covering nearly half of the drive to covering about a quarter of it. So I chose the last shot to use as the background or base layer.

Here we have the base layer.

Then I added the other images onto it complete the light trail for the most part. Below are 4 of the images that I took.

So I cut and pasted each image onto the base layer and chose “lighten” in the blending option for each. I wanted the sky, canyon, and mountains to just be one image. Layer masks is the way to go to complete that task. In the “Layers” window there is a button that is a square with a circle in it called “Add Layer Mask.” Clicking it seems to do nothing except adding a white square next to the layer that you are on (It doesn’t work on the background layer). If we hit the “B” button then we can paint the layer and it will either hide of show what is beneath the layer we are working on. To toggle back and forth between hiding and revealing hit “X.” Alternatively if you want to see through most of the layer below hold “Alt” while clicking the Add layer mask button. You will have a box that is black next to the layer.

To sum up. I cut and pasted the pictures onto the background image, changed them to lighten, added layer masks, then painted the masks to keep the car trails that I wanted. Leading to this image below.

Photoshop is daunting with all of it’s options of what to do. I still only know maybe a quarter of what it can do. Layers and masks are a big part of what I use it for and from talking to other photographers it is a major thing to know and understand. I hope this helps you on your path to understanding photoshop.

~Scott

Post Processing: Presets

Good Afternoon,

Today we are going to discuss presets in post processing as the title said. There are many options for processing RAW files. Cameras generally come with their own software and it can be all that we need. Other times we need to go outside of what the manufacturer provided. Lightroom, Photoshop, Capture One, Affinity Photo, DxO Photolab, and many others. I generally use Lightroom to process images and Photoshop if I need to do some more serious editing.

In Lightroom there are presets already present. B&W: Filter, Toned, and just B&W, then Color presets, General presets, and Effect presets which are all fine and dandy for general use. We can make our own though which can be applied during import. It can be brought down to very specific settings. What we do is open our RAW file then adjust it to our liking then save it through the Develop pull down menu. There is a New Preset option or we can hit ctrl/cmd+shift+N. Now this is more for something that will be used often, (such as noise reduction for different ISOs, portrait with a flash, outside portraits, landscapes, sunsets, etc) if we are looking for something just for one group of photos then we can copy (ctrl/cmd+C) and paste (ctrl/cmd+V) the setting to each image or a group in the grid view. This is just a starting point for when importing images to lightroom, not every landscape we do will be optimal for these settings it beats starting from scratch on each shoot.

Here is where we can apply the presets during import and below the circled setting is Metadata that can be applied as well. If the preset is saved we can skip a step in post.

Here are where any presets we create end up. Sony Standard is my normal and mimics what I see through the viewfinder on Standard setting and is a good starting point.

This is the settings for my own Standard which is usually where I end up with outdoor scenes. Mind you this is for a Sony SLT so it might not work that well for a Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Pentax etc.

If lightroom is not what is used there are ways to make our own presets there as well. Now go out and shoot then make a preset or two to edit the images.

~Scott

P.S. there is a comment section under each post I would enjoy hearing from you all and seeing pictures.

Post Processing

Good evening,

So we have yet to talk about post processing. Something that is sometimes frowned upon. People sometimes say things like "they didn't used to process pictures," "with film they didn't have photoshop," or tagging pictures with "#unfiltered/#nofilter," or "SOOC/Straight Out Of Camera." Well here is a little secret, film images did get processed, and a jpeg SOOC is processed by the camera's computer. So the idea that post processing is new or something to frown at is flawed. Granted if an image is heavily processed or edited to make it unreal then it should not be passed off as a regular image. There is a place for it though just like everything else in photography.

Back in the day of film, images were edited in the darkroom. An image could be cropped, enlarged, brightened, darkened, burned, dodged, solarized, multiple negatives could be layered or combined, multiple negatives could be shined on the paper, and probably many other edits could be done. If two different people or even the same person at different times processed an image it would probably come out looking different. Some of the edits even came over into digital photo processing and retained the same name. The only images that I can think of that were not processed by human "hands" are polaroids, pretty much every other one has been in some way or another.

I will talk about actual post processing in 2 weeks, which is what I am going to be changing the schedule to. Next one should be the 16th. Go out and shoot.

~Scott

A polaroid of my Dad and my oldest Nephew in the mid to late 80s. No processing until I scanned it.