Photographing landscapes is always a popular topic, but it seems to have become even more so over the last year as much of the world has been told to avoid other people and seen events cancelled. And, well, if we can’t point our cameras at other people, what else are we to do if we want to keep shooting and hone our skills? But landscapes require a number of techniques that we don’t typically see in most other genres of photography. One such technique is that of blending multiple shots together, for various reasons, but often for things like HDR or focus stacking. In this video, Adam Gibbs shows us how we can blend multiple images together in Photoshop.
Unlike focus stacking, where it’s your focus distance that’s racking from one range to another, this technique is similar to HDR, except that both of the images have the same overall exposure. Adam used different shutter speeds for these two images, but adjusted the other settings to compensate.
He shot two images in order to be able to capture one shot showing the motion of the flowing water using a slow shutter and another freezing the motion of the leaves that were blowing around in the breeze using a fast shutter speed. The video shows how he blends the two together in Photoshop to combine them into a single image showing off the best of both. It’s a fairly simple technique, but a very effective one, as Adam’s video demonstrates.
