Atlanta portrait and wedding photographers Craig & Cathy Willis

770-439-6065

Blending Two Versions of The Same Image


When photographing weddings, you will have a bride with a white, or off white dress 98% of the time or better. With digital capture the capture of an area that is white, that is important to show detail does require, that you are very careful with your exposure, yet even then, you have some work to make the image ready for print.

In protecting those highlights at the time of capture, you end up with a file that even after you adjust, you end up with something like this.

And even though you might think, hey that is good enough, for some of us, it is just not good enough, because we want the very best presentation of our images.

This one I just posted for example takes it too far, just to bring some image from the dark areas, and you lose all the fine detail in the brides dress. In my opinion this is far less acceptable.

But getting a blend of the two, allowing the background to come out, and yet retain detail of the dress is what I strive to present when ever possible.

Now you are going to ask, but how do you do that, let alone do it in just a matter of seconds.

Here is what I do, you can modify the directions to fit your likes and dislikes.

Because I use and prefer Nikon Capture to work my RAW files, I when I run across a few images that need this extra attention, will adjust the file two ways, and save both, giving a 1 digit change in the file name to keep them together in their folder.

I then open up with CS2 both files, one adjusted as you see in the first image on this page, the second as you see in the second image on this page.

To blend to obtain the results you see in the third image.

Pull the dark image over on top of the light one.

As you click and drag it over, hold down the Shift key and it will automatically lock into place over the other image.

Then go to your menu, and click Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options.

This will open up a new dialog box, look for "blend if" near the bottom and you will see two slider lines.

If you take the top one for "this layer" and start to move it to the right, you will see the two start to blend.

Move it as far as you see it needs to, to bring in the light areas that you are looking for, this will leave the dress looking blown out and too bright.

At that point, hold down the Alt key and start to move the slider back, and do so a little at a time, watching for the details that you want to see come back, but not where if does anything that looks weird to your image.

Then flatten and save to the file type of your choice.

This method of blending can also be used to blend two images that you might have taken using bracketing, for scenery and any other type of photography, so give it a try I am sure you can find some images that would benefit from use of this blending option.


Using Curves


This does not mean there is not another way to get almost the same result.

If you have a white dress, (not off white) and have black areas, which will happen a good part of the time with wedding coverage, then you can use the curves tool, to get almost the same result.

Open up your curves dialog box, Ctrl+M and you will see three eye droppers.

Double click on the white dropper at the right, and set your value to white where you want it.

Set your white point to 245 - 245 - 245 and black to 12 - 12 - 12 and then move the curve in the middle to bring out the mid tone areas.

These settings will give you white yet retain detail, and black without losing detail in the blacks.

The default value of white is 255-255-255 and black 0-0-0, but leaving the eyedropper value at those points makes it harder to get that dynamic range in your adjustment.

You can set those settings as your new default setting to make it easier to work on several images.

Here is the same image using that method.




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