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Camera Techniques for Photoshop

When I'm out in the field taking photographs, I often think in the back of my head about what can I do in Photoshop? And if you think about Photoshop, while you're out shooting, you could modify what you capture. So you get something unique that you can combine with Photoshop techniques to create something that you couldn't otherwise. And the most simple example of that is of course shooting a panorama where you capture more than one image and you have each shot overlap by at least like 30% and then have Photoshop stitch them together. But there are all sorts of other techniques you could use as well. And so let's take a look at what you can do where you change the way you shoot so that you can use something specific in Photoshop. Let's start off with stitching a panorama. In this case, I captured, I think a total of nine images in order to get this panorama when I was in Africa on safari. And if I want to combine those together into a single image, all I need to do is select all these...

images here using bridge and we're gonna merge these together using Adobe camera raw. The reason we're doing that is these are raw files and raw files have special qualities to them. And I want to retain those qualities so that if I adjust the Panorama, once I'm done, I don't lose any of the advantages of a raw file. So with all those images selected, I'm just gonna double click on any one of them. And when I do, they're gonna show up over here on the left side panel. And what I need to do is to select all which would be command a control A and windows. Then I'm gonna hover over any one of the selected images and you find these little three dots. If you click on it, you're gonna get a menu and within that menu is a choice of merge to panorama and then it's gonna think a little while as it combines all these images into a single one and there we have our panorama. Now, when you do it in the upper right, there are some choices for how you would like it to distort the images, to get them to align. And you can choose spherical, which is as if it's laying out these images on the inside a surface of a globe, you know a sphere. And that's one option. Then there's another called cylindrical, which is as if it's laying it out on the inside of a soup can um It's just how it would be distort the image. And then there's a third one known as perspective in perspective won't always be usable. It won't always allow you to, but that would just adjust the location of the four corners of each image and keep them as uh like straight lines on the edges and things. It's uh that's the one that is the least common for me to use. And most of the time it's one of these two and the main thing you'll notice is usually one of them will make your panorama stretched a little bit more vertically and the other one won't. In this particular case though, I was so far away from the subject matter that's here. Uh You're gonna notice very little difference if you were very close up to something and there was both near and far objects and things. You would notice more of a difference between these, then you'll notice that our result is not a perfect rectangle and we need to end up with a rectangular file. So we have a few options on how to do that at the bottom. There's a check box called auto crap and all that's gonna do is crop in and get rid of this little checkerboard that appears. And it's gonna try to make the largest cropped version it could while still getting rid of those checkerboard areas. So if I turn that on it can crop it, but on occasion when you do that, it pulls it in too tight to your subject. Uh And so you have some other options. You have a choice up here called boundary warp. And that's going to take the edges and kind of just stretch them up. It will distort the picture and stretch it in order to fill that and you can do it by a certain amount here. So if I'd use boundary warp and I just bring this up, you'll see it stretching the image and if you bring it to 100% it will have stretched it enough to fill that uh area. I kind of like having auto crop turned on at the time. I adjust boundary warp and then I can see how it kind of starts to expand that cropping because I don't always need it all the way up and sometimes a little less uh is works fine. But if you look at what's happening to the horizon line, if it used to be straight, then you might find that it's no longer straight. So it might not be acceptable to use boundary warp. So we have another option. It's called fill edges. And if I turn it on, it's going to create new information to attempt to fill those edges, but it's mixed in its results. So be sure when you're done, you inspect it very closely. Even in this, you, I can see that right up here, I can see almost like a seam like a little line going through there and it often will have repeated information uh from your image. So just be sure you are critical about the edges if, if you use this particular setting, uh I'm just gonna use auto crop because I think it looks fine uh with that, then if you haven't adjusted your image ahead of time and the image looked overly dark or bright or whatever, you can turn on, apply auto settings. And that's gonna do the same thing as going into uh Adobe camera. And there's an auto button that tries to automatically adjust your image. And so in this case, I don't think it looks good, but if the image looked almost black or just way too contrasty where it was hard to evaluate the panorama turning on that check box could be useful. So in general here, I'm mainly choosing what's known as the projection. Most of the time I'm switching between the top two options. Then if there's a lot of distortion in my Panorama, where let's say the right side is dramatically smaller than the middle, then I might consider using boundary warp uh or fill edges to try to get a usable uh result without having to crop in too far. And I'm just gonna hit merge in the lower right now. It's asking me to name the file and I'm just gonna call it Lions panel, uh click save and it automatically loads it here into Adobe camera raw. So now you could just go over to the right side and work with the various sections of adjustments to fine tune the image, but I'm gonna click done. Now, the end result you end up with, if I head back to bridge, in my case will probably be down here at the bottom. Uh And it will be AD NG file. That's Adobe's version of a raw file. And if you started from uh raw images, this will still retain the qualities of a raw file. So I might as well drag it up there. So it is near the originals and therefore easy to find one thing to look out for when shooting the panoramas is I always lock the exposure so that the brightness is consistent across this. You can do that in one of two ways, either switch to manual mode on your camera so that you specify the ex shutter speed and aperture and it stays consistent between images or on the back of your camera, there's usually a button that might be labeled a el that stands for auto exposure lock. Although on some cameras, it's instead a symbol like an asterisk and press and hold that button and that locks the exposure even if you're in like uh aperture priority mode. The other thing I do when I'm uh shooting panoramas is I make sure that I lock the focus because especially if you're using a long lens like I did here with all these elephants. Uh this panorama is an absolutely huge panorama because this was taken maybe with 10 or 12 different shots so I could print this absolutely huge. But this was a useless panorama. And that's because I did not lock my focus. And when you don't lock your focus, if you're panning across this, taking multiple shots, it's gonna focus on most likely elephant, elephant, elephant. But what happens when you get into an area like this when there is no elephant, it might uh change the focus and suddenly focus on the background. And because of that, if I click to zoom up on this image, I'll zoom out on and I pan across it. You're gonna find that right here. It's in focus. If you see the distance and if I continue across, you're gonna find that that focus suddenly shifts right there and here it's focus close and there it's focused further away. That's what can happen if you do not lock your focus when you are capturing a panorama. So this panorama is useless. Uh I could crop it like and just have these three elephants together. And maybe the group over here. The main thing is I'd have to crop at least here. Don't think panoramas have to be horizontal. This is a panorama where I shot straight down from a bridge and this is the actual shadow. The bridge is casting on this little canyon where a river was going through. And then this time I panned upward, upward, upward until right here, I'm pointing straight above me. So this is about 100 and 80 degrees vertically. If you want to see the shots that were taken, here's me looking straight up, taking one shot, then pan downward, pan, downward, pan, downward, pan downward. Those were the original shots that were combined to create that. Uh oh, it looks like I took one additional one where you can actually see the bridge that I'm standing on. Uh Then you're not limited to just shooting one series of panoramas. You can also shoot in a grid. So in this case, this is what appeared in front of me in Africa. I had a, I think a 500 millimeter lens on my camera, which is why the background went nicely out of focus and uh I could not fit the entirety of this animal in one shot. So I locked my focus and I locked my exposure which are two different buttons on my camera, just holding those buttons in. And I decided to pan and get a little bit above his head, be able to get his entire tail and I just shot kind of a grid going and trying to get some of the background then moving up, going across again, getting above his head and moving around like that until I thought I got the entire area in the surroundings. Well, if I take those images and I send them through the exact same process I showed you with the lion image. This is the result. And then all I needed to do was crop this result. And I had ended up with a nice square image and a nice wide view. The other thing it did for me is any time you can see a wide view and you therefore using a wider angle lens, usually you can't get these really out of focus backgrounds like this In order to get an out of focus background like that, you need to magnify your subject a good amount and shoot uh with your aperture setting as close to wide open as is practical, which means the lowest F stop or near it. In this case, I was able to get that background to be blurry because of that, using a long lens and an aperture setting that was really low, then I could get that wide view with a soft background. And that's just because I stitched the panorama. The same is true for the lion shot. Usually you can't get this wide of a view and still get that mega out of focus background. The soft background happens when you magnify and that's usually when you get a small area. So magnify and make a panorama and then you can get a soft background with a wide view. Now there can be issues when you stitch panoramas. One of them is lens flare if the sun is visible or you're pointed in the direction of the sun, then that sun, if it hits the glass element on the front of your lens, then it's gonna reflect around inside your lens and it's gonna cause these little lens flares that are here or even a whole rainbow of one there. And then if you're panning across, then the sun's gonna be in a different position in the next shot. And that means you're gonna get a repeat of the same kind of lens flare, but in a different position and then you keep panning and the sun is still catching the front element of my lens and causing that lens flare. Well, if I end up taking all of those images and stitching them together, then we've multiplied all those lens flares. Here is the lens flare from one shot. Here's the lens flare from another, there's a hint of a lens flare from another there and so on, you can end up with a lot more lens flare than you would get compared to just shooting it with a single wide angle uh shot. So how can we avoid that? And how can we get a little more control over the process? Well, you should know that you can have an alternative way for stitching a panorama. The alternative is instead of doing it within came raw, you can instead start here in bridge, go up to the tools menu, choose Photoshop and there's a choice there called photo merge, photo merge is what we used to have as our only option to stitch a Panorama. Back before camera was able to do it when they added the functionality to camera raw, they never removed the old one. So we can still do it here. The disadvantage of using this is the end result is not like a raw file. And therefore it's most ideal if you pre adjust your pictures. So if they're overly dark, overly bright or anything else, you fine tune them. So I'm gonna choose photo merge. And when I do this comes up and all this is is a list of the files that I had selected here in the middle. And then on the left side, just like when we were in camera, we have the choice of cylindrical or spherical. And then we have the choice called perspective, which would be similar to the bottom option that was uh in there. And you also have auto where it will pick what it thinks is the best choice. You might as well start with auto and only if you don't like its results, might you come back here and try it again and force it into one of these other uh choices. Then down here at the bottom is a choice called blend images together. And if you don't turn that on, it's just gonna line up the images and it's not gonna become a seamless panorama. But turning that on is going to end up um blending them so they look like a single picture. And then finally down here, you have the choice of content aware, fill transparent areas that's similar to the check box that we had where it can generate new content to fill in any empty areas in your Panorama. I'm gonna click. OK. Here's our result. But in my result, I can see there's a lens flare here, there's a lens flare there and that kind of stuff. So I wanna show you how you can get around this and get more control over it if you really need it. So I'm gonna close this and not save. And let me show you what it's actually doing. When you select multiple images, you go to the tools menu and you choose photo merge because what Photoshop is actually doing is applying three different features in a row and it's just combining those three together to produce this. You can do the three steps separately. And if you do, you can have more control over the process. I rarely need to. But on occasion, in an instance like this where you have a lot of lens flare than I might need to. The first thing it does is choose load files into Photoshop layers. So let's apply that. That's gonna give us a brand new Photoshop file and we're gonna have one layer for each image. The second thing it does is it selects all of these layers. So I'll hold shift and click on that bottom layer. So I have them all. It comes up to the edit menu and it uses this auto align layers. When you're in here, you'll see these options. These are the exact same options you saw on the left side of the photo merge dialogue and these two check boxes were at the bottom. I'm just gonna set this to auto and I'll click. OK. That's gonna align all the images so that if I zoom out it now kind of looks like a panorama, but I can see the edges of each photo because if I turn all these photos off, you'll see it just distorted each one to try to get it to match up with the previous one and so on all the way across. Well, then the third thing that it usually does is go to the edit menu and choose auto blend layers and you just use the um default settings down here. It says content aware fill transparent areas. That's the exact same choice you saw when we were in photo merge to fill the empty areas. I'm gonna just not use it now and I'll click. OK? And that's where it's gonna make it. So this is a seamless panorama. So now we have the exact same result that we got when we chose photo merge. But here's the difference if I choose undo. So I don't use that last step. I could inspect these layers before I do it and here I see a lens flare right there. Let's see if one of the other layers happens to overlap that. And it does, although it also has a lens flare. But what I could do here is I could use a selection tool and I could force it to not use this area right here. All I'm gonna do is hit delete. So that, that lens flare just doesn't exist and therefore it will have to choose something from here. Then if you look in the first image, look in this area here and you'll notice when I turn on the next layer, it had a lens flare in that spot. So I'm gonna click on the layer that's above and I'm just gonna delete this area. So it just doesn't exist and it's forced to use it from the other picture. I think I might be able to do the same thing right there. And up here, I'd like to do the same thing here. The only problem was this part here, let me go a little wider, this part here. Uh Almost or did touch the lens flare that I deleted from that first layer. I think it was right up in here. So I'm gonna have to be very careful to not go out too far. If we go out too far, we're gonna have a hole in our panorama that's still OK. In fact, right there is the hole um because we can use another feature retouching to fill it in. Then I can go to the next one and there I see the lens flare right here. It's kind of delete. So I can't use it as long as you have enough overlap between your images, then it can force it to use those other images because this lens flare should be in a different position in each shot because it has to do with the angle of the sun relative to uh the lens. And as long as when I turn on these other layers, it fills in those holes, then I could come in and try to force it. Uh I don't see any lens flare there or there or there or there. So we're gonna have one issue which is this spot right there. And so there, we're gonna have an empty hole and that's where one lens flare uh overlapped another. But now let's select all these images. Let's come up here to edit and finally do that last step of auto blend layers. Click OK. And now we have a seamless panorama and we have no lens flare. And what I could have done is duplicate the layers. So I had my original panorama in here uh Before going through the technique I just did and then I could just put that original panorama underneath and it would fill in this whole, I might see some lens flare in there. But then that would be the one area I'd have to manually retouch to remove whatever lens flare was there. In this case, I'd have to come in here and I doubt it's gonna look appropriate, but I would probably end up using, I'll just put a new layer on top, uh content aware fill or um generative fill, generative fill would probably look the best. But I could attempt, oh, I have to have sample all layers turned on, but I could come in here and attempt to get it to figure out what to put in there. And if I don't like it, sometimes I'll have to go over an area twice. But hopefully, it just gives you the idea that you could get more control over the process if you really needed to. And it's just nice to have that knowledge because there are some instances when it can really be an issue. Well, now let's see how that same feature we just used can be used for something else here. I'm at Roy's in Amboy, California and I'm shooting through a window, but I'm really close to the window. And if I focus on the sign, I couldn't get the window to be sharp. So I took a second shot where I focused on the glass and therefore the sign is not sharp and I wish I would have been perfect and got the line up just right. But let's see what we can do with this. I'm gonna select both of these and I'm gonna send it to Photoshop and tell it to load it as Photoshop layers. So now we have one layer for each. I'm gonna select these two. And the first thing is let's align them because I wasn't on a tripod and I might have moved a little bit. So I'll choose auto and let's see if it can align them. It tweaked them a teeny bit, I can tell because I see this little gap over here. That means it had to move one of those photos over a little bit and it had to move it down a little bit and that caused that to show up. But now let's go back in here and let's use auto blend. Those are the same two features that we used to try to stitch a panorama. And you'll notice when I come in here, it switched before it was set to panorama, but it realized that it's already auto aligned these images. And when it did, they pretty much stayed right on top of each other. And when that's the case, you're gonna have this choice called stack images. And if you do when you click, OK, I'm just using default settings here. It's gonna compare those layers and it's going to try to only keep the areas that are sharp from each layer. So the glass was sharp in one and the background was sharp in another. So now we got the sharp areas from both layers, if I turn off the eyeball in one layer, you'll see, it's using only that portion of one layer and then I'll switch which layer is visible. It's using that portion of the other. And then we quit the two together and we have our end resolve. So now, instead of having either blurry glass or a blurry sign, we have both of them being sharp. That's something that is usually known as focus stacking. And most of the time it's done whenever you try to photograph something that's really, really small because as you magnify something, usually the background gets blurrier and blurrier. And so in order to get a wide uh depth that is sharp, you usually need to take more than one photo. And this works not with just two shots, but I could have focused on the sign, took one shot and then focus maybe this distance, took another focus here, focus there and then focus on the glass and then it would have looked better because it would have been sharper all the way throughout. And that's how usually focus stacking is done. Here's another technique where I changed the way I'm shooting, knowing I'm gonna end up in Photoshop here. I'm taking a picture of a waterfall in Iceland and it's not a very tall waterfall. Instead it goes over a big horizontal distance. And what I did is set up my camera on a tripod and I'm taking a long exposure. So I can get this kind of silky water. But then I experimented with my shutter speed. And so I ended up with this version and also this version that had a shorter shutter speed and this version and this one and maybe even one more. And now what I can do is decide uh that I want to combine those together. And so let's do it. I'm gonna select the first image a hold shift and select the last and then let's go over here and stack them as layers in Photoshop. Now I'm gonna decide which one of these I like the best. Which one do I think I want to use the majority of the photograph. So there's this that just keep working my way down until I see which one I think I want to use the most of. And I'm thinking it might be this one, whatever one I think I want to use the most of I'm gonna put at the bottom because then I can build more pieces above. But I think I noticed when I turned some of these on and off that I thought I saw the tiniest bit of motion where I might have bumped my tripod, be cut right there. If you compare this, they're in slightly different positions. So I'm gonna select all these. And even though I was on a tripod, I'm gonna auto align them to try to compensate for any motion there was between them. Now if I turn them off, hopefully I don't notice that motion anymore and I don't. All right, I have my bottommost layer. That's my base. I'm gonna start with. Now, what I'm gonna do is just turn on each layer one at a time to see. Is there anything I like in that layer that I'd like to add? So turn this on, turn it off, turn it on, turn it off and I'm just looking and I'm just, what I'm doing is like looking at one spot, turn it off, then looking at another spot, turn it on and just toggling it on and off. And when I do that, I find in the left side of the photograph, I like this area over here more than I do when I have it turned off. And so I think in that area, I would like it. And also at the very top of the photograph, if you look up there near the left side, I like it better up there as well. And so at least in those two areas, I think I want to use this. So what I'm gonna do is add a layer mask. When I add the layer mask though, I'm gonna hold option. That's alton windows, that's gonna make the mask black and therefore it hides the layer, then I can come in here and just paint it in where I liked it. So I'm gonna put it in right there and I think I also liked it. Oops, I didn't mean to do that and I think I also liked it up here. So I'll paint it in up there. Then if you want to, you can disable the layer mask to once again, view all of the image you do that by holding down the shift key and then I can compare it. And what I noticed there is in the bottommost layer, I did a long enough exposure that this little area here, uh there was some breeze and it moved and it's out of focus. Whereas in the other one, it looks much sharper. So what I'm gonna do is just paint that in as well. And I'm assuming this might be sharper in that version too. And same with these things just because if one thing moved or in the, the wind that the others probably did too, then I'll just repeat the process with the next layer, I'll turn it on, turn it off, turn it on, turn it off and try to decide, is there anything I like better in that one than I do in the others? And I think in this particular case, it's this area over in here that I'm liking better when I turn this on. And also some of this middle part to me looks smoother. So that's where I'm thinking about adding it where the blue part of the water is and maybe right over in here. So I'm just gonna repeat the process option. Click on the layer mask icon to get a black mask, grab your paint brush paint with white with a soft edge brush and come in here and just combine these together if you want to see where you've painted because sometimes you leave little gaps between your paint strokes. What you can do is on your keyboard right above the return key is a backslash key. And if you press it, you're gonna get an overlay, it'll be a red overlay. The only problem is when you do it, your foreground color will likely switch. So you have back on the top. I had white before and here I can see where I missed a spot and you can paint while you're in this overlay. So you could make sure you got all the spots you were really thinking of with no gaps to get out of that view, just hit the backslash key again. And then remember the other thing you can do is hold shift and click on that to uh disable the mask and see everything that was in there and decide. Is there any other area where you like that better? Uh And it's personal choice and what everything looks like. So I kind of like the right edge of the photo at the bottom when I turn that off. So that means I'm gonna just paint a little further over here and then I'll just do the same thing. So this one. And I'm liking some of the upper regions, these areas up in here. I think they look uh kind of sharper, more distinct uh in that version. So let's option click on the mask and then I'm thinking this just felt like it was more refined, less mega blurry. And so I'll do that and once again, shift click to see if you missed a spot. I think I like it right there and so on. Anyway, I don't need to do too much with this because I think you get the gist of it and it could be that right here. I really like that little bit of detail right there. You can get into tiny little areas if you want to and you don't have to use all the layers. Uh So it's just those are as many shots as I happen to have taken and you can option click on the mask. And then I think I like that in a few of these areas. And therefore you don't have to use the same shutter speed everywhere. If in the end, you end up with some layers that you didn't use because maybe you took 20 pictures and you only use four of them. You can always go to the side menu of the layers panel. There's a choice called delete hidden layers and that'll throw away any layers that have the eyeballs turned off and I choose don't show again. So it doesn't warn you every time because wh whatever I chosen it, if I didn't want to delete all the layers. And then the last thing you need to do is just grab the crop tool and with the crop tool, the last time I used it, I had a ratio turned in, I'll hit clear and if you just switch away from it and back, it'll kind of reset if you wanna crop out the tiniest amount of info. The problem is this thing will snap where you can't get it to just get one pixel out of the edge. So after you click, uh when your mouse button is held down, hold down control and that turns off the snapping temporarily. So if I wanna get like one pixel from the right side, I click, hold control and then it won't snap to the edge. Otherwise, when you get really close to the edge, it's just gonna snap right over there and there we go. Let's look at the difference. Here's one and there's multiple. Here's another instance when you want might want to do a similar technique. In this case, this is light painting. I'm taking these pictures at night and I'm using a flashlight and I lit this area with a flashlight. I lit some of the interior with a flashlight and I even kick some light into the headlights with a flashlight. Here, I put a green gel over the flashlight here on another shot in a similar way another one for the headlights and the way I actually do that is I have a black glove on. Oops, I have a black glove on and I touch the flashlight to this and I'm tracing like right here and it is reflecting that through the reflector at the back and it's coming out the other side. Then when I move my hand away, it exposes this part. Uh but that's how that was done here. I'm trying to get the logo and then I filled in this area. So anyway, if I do like painting a separate exposures, I can then select them go to tools, Photoshop, load files into Photoshop layers. Once they're all loaded, then I can select those layers. And what I end up doing is I change this menu, which is a blending mode menu and I use lighten mode that's gonna act as if all those were put together, then I can turn on and off each layer. Uh Here, let's say I like it better with that completely off for now. And I can go to the next layer and say, do we like this? And is it if so is it only part of it? If it's only part of it, then I add a layer mask and I paint with black wherever I didn't like it. So let's say in this particular case, I don't like that it's hitting the ground at the bottom of the photograph. So I grab my brush, I paint with black and I just paint across there to say, get it off the ground. Uh Then I can go to the next layer and say, is there anything I don't like about this layer? And in this particular case, maybe what I don't like is the fact that it comes up above the hood or something. Well, just add a layer, mask and paint with black to say I didn't like it up there and do that for each one of these layers. Maybe in this case, I only want the bottom edge of these. So I'm gonna add a mask and I'm going to paint with black to say I don't like that top edge a little too bright. Maybe this one is too bright. Just wanted that little hint in there in this one here. I see a little spill on the ground. I don't like it. So I add a mask paint with black and that's how I combine together multiple exposures for a light painting. Uh Let's say I didn't like the light over here. All I gotta do is turn off these one at a time while I stare at that area to try to figure out which one of these layers caused it. And it looks like it was partially this one. So I can paint with black over there to say I don't want it in that area. And then I might need to go through the others like that one to see if it also contributed to it. But unfortunately, if I paint that out, it gets rid of too much. Also, in the previous one, I shouldn't have painted up where the sky is. So you get the idea, I hope. All right, let's look at one other technique where I changed the way I shoot knowing I'm gonna end up in Photoshop here. I am in a tiny church in Iceland. And when I'm in that church, I could easily see when I'm standing there what was outside these windows. But I pick up my camera and I take a picture and it couldn't that is, it couldn't if I wanted to see the inside of the church. So I changed my exposure and I took another shot. That shot is two stops darker. Then I ended up thinking, well, I can't see what's out the window. So let's take another shot two stops darker. I can start to see what's outside the window, but I still can't see enough. So another shot two stops darker. And even there, it seems to be that this is a little overly bright and this might be solid white. It's hard to tell. So I might take one more shot to stop darker. And I think finally at this point, I might be getting it all. So my camera can't capture as wide of a range as my eyes can see. So now that I've gotten all of those shots. And there's a feature on my camera that makes that easier. It's called auto bracketing. I can select all those images and what I'm gonna do is double click on them to get it into camera raw. Then I'm gonna select all by typing command. A, I'm gonna come over here, click on the three little dots and you're gonna find a choice called merge to HDR. When you do, it's gonna merge all of those images together into a single image that contains that full brightness range. Usually you want aligned images turned on, especially if you shot handheld like I did. Uh I think I shot handed. Now, then you'll want to have aligned images turned on. I usually even have it turned on even if I'm shooting on a tripod because sometimes I bump the tripod the littlest bit when pressing the shutter. And if it's still hard to see what's out here, that's because we're only seeing a uh certain brightness range. We haven't optimized the image yet. And turning on apply auto settings might give you a better idea for what you have. And if there was any motion in the scene, there's a river and therefore waves in the, the water changing or there's a flag waving or it's breezy out and there are leaves out here moving, then there's this area called de Ghost. And you would wanna change this to at least low and you'd use that and inspect the areas where there was motion and see if it looks better and if it doesn't go up higher and higher, and when you do that, you can turn on this check box called Show Overlay. And it'll put red on top of your image where it thought it might have seen motion. That's where it tried to minimize the motion as you go to higher and higher settings. Usually that red will cover a wider area. I don't think it was breezy out there though. So I'm gonna leave that set off. Then sometimes I turn off this check box when I'm done because I like process processing my images from scratch. If I have this turned on the sliders in the adjustment uh area will already be moved around and sometimes I get a little mis oriented because I'm not used to that. Uh And I'm used to starting from scratch. It's personal choice though. If you want to start from this, you can, I'm gonna turn it off though and hit merge. It's gonna ask me to name this. I'm just gonna call it HDR one. It'll be AD NG file, which is Adobe's version of a raw file. And then when it's done, it should load it right into camera raw. So it would be the bottommost in selected image. So then I could come up here and adjust it. The simplest way to adjust it is to take the highlights and bring it all the way down, then you're gonna see what was out in that bright area and then take the shadows and bring it all the way up. And after you do that, you can adjust contrast, if there's too big of a difference between those two or adjust exposure. If overall the image needs to be a bit brighter or a bit darker, you can then fine tune it more with all the other settings that are in here. You might need to come down to this area called curve. And if you use this icon here, you'll have additional sliders so you can fine tune your highlights even more and then go with areas a little bit lighter than that, a little bit darker than that and the darks. But what you dial in here will be different for every single photo you ever adjust. I might also need to come into effects and possibly bring up clarity to get it to pop just a little bit. But in general use HDR. Anytime you point your camera at a scene and regardless of what exposure setting you use, you either end up with the brightest areas, ended up being solid white with no detail whatsoever. And if that area is important or you end up with the darkest areas of your picture being solid black, regardless of what exposure setting you use. And oftentimes you'll get both where I'm like white, completely white highlights, completely black shadows. That's when you need HDR. Where you take more than one exposure and what you want is make sure that the darkest exposure has no areas that are solid white so that the highlights are not blown out. And therefore you captured that detail, then take another shot, two stops, rider, another shot two stops brighter and keep going with additional shots until it's easy to see detail in the dark portion of the picture. If the dark portion of the picture is important. So ideally, in this case, I would have taken one more shot if I really wanted to see this detail. Because if I attempt to brighten this up in the end result, this will be full of noise and I'll make that noise more obvious. So one more exposure would have been ideal in this case to go one more shot brighter, some people will claim you can get away with fewer shots here. Like I could combine this image, skip that one and go to this one, skip this one and go to that one. And on occasion, you can get away with that, but sometimes it's not smooth enough. And therefore I tend to err on the side of too many shots, then not enough because I'm probably not gonna be processing an image like this until I leave Iceland. And if I didn't take enough shots, it's not like I can go back very easily. So there you go, a bunch of techniques for changing the way you shoot and using those images in Photoshop to do something unique.