How to Blend Exposures for Interiors in Photoshop using luminosity masks
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- Опубліковано 6 сер 2024
- Interiors, Real Estate, and other indoor architecture photographs all create the same problem: blown highlights in the windows and outside view. The dynamic range between the dark interior and bright, sunny exterior is just to great to capture in a single image.
Manual exposure blending is an excellent option for controlling these blown highlights during retouching. The results look much better than HDR, free you from the constraints of using strobes or shooting only at the golden hour, and can be used in conjunction with those other techniques as well.
In this video, I'll show you two different methods to blend exposures for interiors. The first technique (using BlendIf masks) is simpler and allows for fast results that look very good. The second technique (painting through luminosity selections) requires a little more work or knowledge, but offers the best possible results.
And finally, I'll show you a couple of techniques to blend people into the photograph, to create an image that is more welcoming.
All images in this demo are copyrighted by Jeffrey Totaro.
Key Segments:
0:00 Intro
2:45 BlendIf masking
5:48 Painting through luminosity selections
13:24 Blending people into the image - Навчання та стиль
Dude, this is for me, when blending darker images (windows mainly) the best way! and faster too! thanks bro!
Excellent, thanks Greg!
Great tutorial...thank you. I have some interior residential shots that I've been trying to blend cleanly...this is very helpful.
Great video!!
absolutely awesome tutorial for architectural interiors. Lumenzia in my blending tool of choice. Thank you greg, all you hard work does make a real difference to punters like me. If you ever get to Australia, i will buy you a drink.
Thabks, Mark!
I'm sold. :)
Perfect tutorial Greg, thank you so much. This is exactly what I have been hoping to see from you. Personally, I would love to see more architectural and interiors blending videos. That is one area that I have been struggling to make Lumenzia work for me. Building up the blends slowly over multiple exposures is probably where I have been going wrong. I think that I have been trying to get too much detail back too quickly which has been causing weird artifacts and ghostly / muddy blends.
It's very tempting to look for a single mask that does everything, but I nearly always use selections or refine my masks. And more importantly, painting through a selection creates entirely new results (here I turned a grey selection of that blue beam pure white by painting repeatedly). Very powerful stuff.
Thanks for that. One more question for you if I may. Do you prefer to use Smart Objects for your base layers for this type of work so you can go back to re-manipulate your raw files? I keep going back and forth between using LIghtroom and Capture One for my raw image editing. I far prefer Capture One's output to Lightrooms, but have recently started to learn a bit more about the benefits of Smart Objects in photoshop (which Capture One does not support). Maybe I am trying to get too much out of the raw processor when I really should be concentrating my efforts more in Photoshop. I would really appreciate your opinion on this.
I use a lot of Smart Objects, but not that often on the RAW itself, unless I'm not sure about some specific thing that I won't be able to recover later (typically tonal detail, sometimes color). You can always re-export and replace the base layer (copy any masks over), which is functionally the same as using a Smart Object on that stage of the image. I do replacements there from time to time.
That makes perfect sense. Thanks for your replies and for thanks for your willingness to share your knowledge with others.
Nice vedio thanks bro ❤️
Hey, Greg! Thanks for this tutorial. Good stuff. One question though, I get your explanation on why you masked in the windows on two layers. Isn't the top window layer the only layer that is visible (for windows)?
One just simply has more shadow detail, one has more highlight detail, and I’m just using the best of each.
@@gregbenzphotography Thanks Greg! I get that. But it looks like you used two layers for one area, the windows. Is that what you're referring to? I bought your course so perhaps you'll cover that in more detail . . .
I gave this a try to refine my processing to real estate photography for my agents. I'm from Philadelphia, there it wasn't a huge deal to get perfect outside windows. Now i live in flrodia and that is all agents care about. After all, that is what people are paying big money for, to see the beach out their window. I shoot a 5 bracketed shot in raw with a nikon D3s, enfuse the images using light room effuse, however it never gave me the best out side window result after i would increase my exposure. So I use the combined method of enfused with Lumenzia to pull the windows back in and refine all other parts of the image. Just started testing last night and for the most part results are much better. every few images or so I would lose contrast on the outside view, maybe it is because ive been trying to pull in the darkest window shot in one try, it works a little better if I build into it like Greg suggests. Little bit of practice should help with the issue and make it alot faster.
Great to hear you’re having some good results! Just keep at it, the results will keep improving.
Hey Greg, any chance you will be updating this tutorial for 5.0? I've tried your preblend tips for 4.0 with 4 different raw exposures and I'm struggling to get a clean output. Thanks.
5.0? Current version of Lumenzia is V8.5.1. Everything you need to find your link or have it resent is available here (this is linked from the bottom of my newsletters as well): gregbenzphotography.com/lumenzia-updates/
More resources: gregbenzphotography.com/exposure-blending-luminosity-masks
Hey there. Can I restore the purchase of Lumenzia if I update my machine later on?
Marcus Vinicius yep!
Hey Greg - i'd love to see an interiors tutorial on window pulling! Any chance you could do one?
I’ve got a couple of interiors that I process in my course (gregbenzphotography.com/exposure-blending-master-course).
Thanks for the speedy reply Greg. I had a look at the course but it feels like the interiors part (the only one I'm interested in) is fairly small in the course. Is there a way of just buying that chapter?
No, the whole thing is integrated and builds on itself. There are 2 interior edits in the course. The other segments show a lot of techniques that would be helpful in a variety of work, including real estate.
Ah thats a shame. Any chance you could email me the finished shots from that part of the course so I can decide whether it will be worthwhile for me? I don't expect any of the info obviously - but just the finished jpegs from that chapter so I can decide on whether to purchase or not. You have my email already as I'm a Lumenzia customer.
Traveling now, email me as a reminder to send to you.
I'm always interested in anything featuring luminosity masks.... However, your panel seems overly complicated, compared to the way I work... by creating a mask in "apply mask" then altering the mask in levels or curves directly on the mask..... Then using the built in "Blend if filters" adjust to taste...
The approach shown in the video allows you to preview and tweak the mask. There is no faster way you could customize a luminosity selection that I know of. The whole process is three clicks (click something like L2, adjust levels, "Sel"). Adusting the levels is optional, but allows better results through customization. The BlendIf was a separate method, and is applied directly with a single click. If you want to directly apply a standard mask, you can put Lumenzia into "live" mode and add masks with a single click (ie, click L2 and an L2 mask would be immediately added). What are you doing that would be faster than any of those approaches? They are all 1-3 clicks in the panel.
My concerns - that by using the Lumenza panel, does not really help in fully understanding of how photoshop works.... Its a very clever and well thought out aid, but a bit like using a translation app in foreign country, instead of learning the local language..
I always watch all your videos, but just felt like adding my thoughts (as feed back) as I found it particularly difficult to follow your processing steps in this tutorial.
I agree that you can learn about channels by manually creating masks, but to be completely honest, I cannot think of a single step in that process that is useful to me when I'm using Lumenzia. I'm really not sure that it does anything but create work.
I always appreciate feedback. What steps did you find hard to follow in the tutorial? Sounds like I may have created the impression of complexity for you. It's actually pretty simple. Method #1: switch to "BlendIf" mode and click on the various L buttons to find the best blend, and then add a group mask to restrict the blending to just the areas that need it. Method #2: Preview the L masks to find best fit, tweak Levels as desired, load as a selection ("sel"), then paint white onto a black mask on the layers to blend.
Indeed, this is just a way to speed up your workflow. I see this as an action panel, witch give you the opportunity to speed things up. Great tool and great tutorial!
Biggest thing I'm struggling with is order of operations. So when you have multiple layers of exposure you work bottom up turning one layer on at a time to process?
Yes, that’s the way. Most commonly with the darkest exposures sorted to the top. Think of it as progressively restoring the highlights in a series of steps.
@@gregbenzphotography Got it. Is there a rule of thumb for how many bracketed images should be used. Big jumps between exposures seem to blend unnaturally.
@denizahmet2299 whatever works is fine, but moving more than one stop at a time typically causes problems
Is each mask that's being created based on the layer you are applying it to or was it created from the various tones of the base exposure?
It’s based on the current view of the image. So it’s completely flexible, you could build it from any layer, the blended image, etc.
@@gregbenzphotography trying to wrap my head around how this is done manually without lumenzia just so I have a better understanding...if we're working on this manually - let's say on the second exposure like you were in this video - if that "lights 2" mask came from the second exposure wouldn't the midtones and darker highlights be more restricted since the second exposure is darker?
Lumenzia does a lot of custom stuff that you wouldn’t do manually. Here’s a video showing the general idea for manual creation, but I’d strongly suggest just getting my free panel if you’re concerned with cost. I don’t think there’s hardly anything useful to be learned by creating these manually: ua-cam.com/video/Z4mG6vlJFNQ/v-deo.html
@@gregbenzphotography just watched that one actually. I'm leaning heavily towards purchasing Lumenzia...especially once I found Thomas Brigatinos videos. Seems like a lot of architectural photographers use your panel.
It’s very popular for that.
OOC, why not combine L3 & L4 as one selection? Is that possible?
youtube is confusing L3 includes everything from L4 and more. But you can customize either in Lumenzia to be more or less restrictive as desired.
Oh, that makes perfect sense--I have been thinking all wrong about it! Thank you Greg, great product!
youtube is confusing be sure to check out the "Quick Start" video under tutorials for more info on customizing the masks.
How do we get Lumenzia?
gregbenzphotography.com/lumenzia/
Anybody here looking for some retouching work? I use Lumenzia in my workflow, but just have too much editing to keep up with.
Might want to contact Thomas Brigantino, he does beautiful interiors work.
Greg Benz thanks!!
I understand your need to sell something but you've lost me with this panel stuff. It seems more tutorials are going this route and it's a bit aggravating for someone trying to learn from scratch
I have other tutorials that show other ways of blending that can be done with my free panel.
Lovely tutorial Greg but the sound is really awkward due to the extremely silent bits whenever you pause. It makes your commentary very hard to follow unfortunately.
Güneş Haksever thanks for the feedback. Is there a particular time point in the video I should review?
Such as moments between 0:31 and 0:33, where you speak the words: "of...dealing with this". The silence between these words (I assume they're created by a voice recording software which automatically blocks background noise) makes the speech unnatural and is present throughout the entire video. As a person with a slight OCD on these things, I found myself focusing on these silent moments rather than what you say. :D
Güneş Haksever thanks. I think I was actually trying to fight a hiccup at that particular moment. Really appreciate the specific feedback. Will keep an eye out for it, as you noted there were a few times with pauses.
Hi Greg! Great tutorial and congrats for it! Especially in architecture area some more ideas and techniques will be greatly appreciated. Please also look at the sound an put it a little louder because it was little difficult to follow you with all volume on max.
Gabriel Dan Jinga thanks for the feedback. Was the video much more quiet than other UA-cam videos? I haven't noticed that on my end, but I used a new mic for this video.