Focal Length Blending Photography

1. Introduction: Hi, it's drawn from Ron valid photography and I'd like to say thank you for purchasing this course and welcome to the focal length blending equals. In this course, you're going to learn how to get that wide angle shot off still keeping perspective on the background. You've most likely bullet is caused because you've seen and tried to get the shot when you've got that perfect foreground shaped plant, flower, rock, whatever it may be. But a mountain in the background or something in the background just seems time. So this is how to fix it. Focal length blending is the answer to doing and solving this exact problem. For the example we'll be doing in the field, we're going to be using a wide angle zoom lens as these are the types of shots that work best for this scenario. I'm going to be taking you to a view of credit mountain in Tasmania to show you how to get the shots that we're going to then be editing inside of post-processing. Once we get back to the studio, I'll show you everything you need to know about blending these exposures together. And I'll also be showing you a little bit about finishing the images inside of Photoshop. This is going to include things like dodging and burning, sharpening, and just the general Photoshop edits and then a little whys that we finish it off in London as well to give the image that surreal realism that we all love to see. All of the videos and rural files of this course are available to download. Now, if you do decide to download these and share the image on your own social media that I've shared with you. Please do give appropriate credit as it gives credit to the work that has been done here and also helps to share this knowledge with other photographers. I'd also like to ask you do not use the imaging any commercial acts aspect as It is still my image. It has just been gifted to you as an example to use and test these new skills on. I hope you enjoy the course and I'll see you in the next video. 2. How To Shoot - On Location In Tasmania: Hi and welcome to Tasmania. We here with the camera setup on a tripod right out the front of credo Mountain, which you can see it just up there. The scene in front of me is absolutely beautiful way in golden hour at the moment, standing, looking at dove like and right in front of me is this lovely little plant. It's very interesting. It's got that nice foreground interests stands out amongst the little grassy funds that are in the scene as well. And what we're doing is we're going to be shooting at wide angle. So I'm going to be starting off at 16 millimeters. What to look for in a composition like this is I defined line on the horizon, like we have here, with the line of the light looking at the mountain. If you're looking at a same with trees moving consistently through the same, it's going to be a little bit harder to do this type of technique rather than having a defined line on the horizon. Now with trees, if you are zooming in and there on the horizon line while you're blending, the scale is going to be out a little bit. If you have a reflection, you will have to blend in the reflection at with the tree. So you have to make sure you capture all the sorts of things in the same. Now it is a little bit easier with this one because we do have that defined horizon line. And I will show you what I do when I zoom in. And then we'll go back to the studio. Now, let's get into taking the shots that we're going to be blended with the lens set at 16 millimeters. Now on going to be focusing first on the foreground interests of the plot. So I'll do that. And I've got a composition framed and set up already to go of just refocused on the plant. And we'll take this shot so that we can get everything right for what we need in the foreground before we move on to doing the background. Now just a note as well I am going to be doing to shot bracketing. So one at a normal exposure and one one-stop underexposed. Now the reason I'm doing this is how the capture all the highlight details if I need to. So let's take this first shot. Now with that first shot taken at EFF 13, that gave me enough depth the field. And I check to make sure that my foreground interest was nice and sharp, which is great. That's what we want. We need IT shop because that helps to keep the view was I attracted into the image. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to readjust the composition. And what I need to do here is I'm going to go from 16 millimeters and zoom into 35. Now if I do this just normally, it's going to cut off most of credo Mountain, which is not what you want. You actually want to be able to see the mountain. That's the whole purpose of the shot. When I zoomed in again all the way to 35, I left a little bit of headroom above the mountain. So this is similar to taking a portrait, but for a mountain, in a way, you want to leave a little bit above so that you can capture that nice colorful sky, general sky, whatever it may be, you just want to give it that bit of breathing room so that you've got some room to work with. Now, also, when we zoom in, this brings in compression. So this is the reason that your camera would make the moon huge if you zoomed into it on a, let's say an 800 millimeter lens. Now that's a long focal length. It makes the moon look huge in your frame. And it also works. It's polar opposite when you go to wide angle. That's why in the center of the lens when using all the way to 16 millimeters on a full frame like this, it pushes the mountain or the mid ground all the way out as far as it could go. So that's why mountains look really tiny and that's where this technique comes in. So we'll zoom in all the way to Thirty-five millimeters. But this time I'm going to bring up the composition and that'll make sure that it's nice and level. And then I'm going to refocus and about halfway through the image. And now the reason I'm doing halfway, because we're going to end up most likely doing a bit of a focus stack because we wanted to make sure that the whole image is shop from front to back, so refocused in the middle. And I'm going to retake the shop now they said blood off some of the foreground, which is OK because we are going to be blending in that wider foreground that we had before. And finally, I'm going to re-focus all the way up to the mountain. I'm still doing my to shop brackets. So this one image will be made up of six different images. I'll capture that image map. And that is looking really good. I'm just going to have a bit of a check. Zoom right in and see how shaft is. It's nice and sharp. We have captured what we wanted to perfectly. And now we'll be able to take it back to the studio and actually put these images together to create the final image. 3. Post-Processing in Lightroom & Photoshop: Hi and welcome back to the studio. Where back hit now and I've got Lightroom and Photoshop both open, so I'm going to jump inside, make a few small tweaks inside of Lightroom first get the image is looking right how we want them to. And then we're going to take them over into Photoshop. And I'll show you how to do this focal blending technique, as well as a little bit of luminosity mosque blending, and a couple of other tricks, just the way that I finish photos or finish photos inside of Photoshop. And then we'll save it back into library. Mankoff final adjustments. So let's jump into it. Alright, so here we have all of our images and what we're going to do is we're going to take this image which you saw before and turn it into this image with all of these types, all of these frames that we've got here. So you can see that there's a big difference between that and that. So that's what we're going to do. Now. One were happening in the field. We took six shots here and then this is obviously the seventh in the gallery. So when I'm actually not going to use all of these images, we're going to use this one, this one, this one, and this one. So here is our wide angle exposure. This is our Middleground focus, and this is our background focus. And then this is going to be for our sky. So let's, I'm just going to delete some of these out of here. And quickly also the images that I'm using here to edit, they are all available to download. Now, I do ask that if you are going to edit this, please do share it. Please credit me as the photographer. That would be greatly appreciated and it also gives credit to the work that has already being done. Secondly, I'm using a Mac here and the keyboard is obviously different if you're using a PC. So anytime I say command, it is control on your computer. Anytime I say option, that is going to be Alt on your computer and any other little adjustments I do, I do verbalize them and bring up the keyboard strokes for you so that you can see exactly what I'm doing. Ok, so let's jumping to editing these images. This first one is what I'm going to do my bass edit on. So I'm going to press the de qi and take that over into the develop module. And now we are inside of the develop module and just going to press the key on the keyboard to get rid of the inflammation up there. And here's where we're going to do a bass edit. Now normally when I import a camera calibration preset is applied, I have made these available for you to download as well. And normally it goes straight to camera landscape. I'll turn this off when I reset it, just so that I could show you this. And if I turn it off and on, you can see how much of a difference that already makes this brings it to create more of that sort of JPEG image look that you had in the back your camera while still keeping it as a rural file. So let's jump into our Basic panel here. While keeping it a role file. So I'm going to go into lens corrections and Enable Profile Corrections and remove chromatic aberration. That is always a good one to do because if there's any green or purple lines around high areas of contrast, like they would be up here. Now this is soft because we've obviously focused on the foreground. Sometimes you'll see chromatic aberration appearing around there. If a ton that off, you can actually see it up here now. And if a tenant off, you can see that it disappears, which is great. That's what we needed. The enlightenment does a pretty good job. So we're going to go up to the Basic panel now and stop doing the general edits. And what we're looking for here is we're looking for this area. We're not looking at the sky. We don't need the sky to be edited. That's what we've got a single exposure for. So we're just going to be looking at the foreground. Now that brings down the highlights nicely there and bring up the shadows a little. And then I'm going to hold option, select the white and you can see just the line around the top of the mountains. And we're going to make sure that it's just a tiny bit there. And that unhappy with. So we've got a nice pure white point. And then I'll do something similarly, the blacks down the bottom, you can see just those tiny specs. I'll bring it up a little bit to about there. So that's we had it pretty well exposed with the highlights and shadows as well as the camera exposure. And then I'll add some contrast in it and you can see how much this saturates the color. So if you take it all the way, that's definitely Y2 fall. If I bring it back, it looks a little flat and bring it up just a tad to about 28. I don't usually go over 50. It's very rare that I do. This saturates at, brings in that nice natural contrast without losing that realistic feel, which is what we want. We don't want to lose it realistic field, but we want to give it a surreal realism. Okay, and then I'm ever so small amounts of clarity. This just brings out some of the midtone Contrast, but too much clarity can really just wipe out an image, gives us that real grunge look. So I'll just add a very small amount. And I'm starting to get quite happy with how they sent me just looking. So we'll skip through the kind of tone. Cove. Don't really need to do any HSL because there's already some nice and natural looking colors there with the golden light that we had. And we've gone to enhance eyes a little bit more in, when we're finishing inside of Photoshop, I'm going to run straight down here to detail. And of course, our focal point is the plant down here. Now when you zoom in all the way like this, it does look a little bit soft. But when we bring the sharpness up, you can see that it brings back that detail. Now, bring the shop, I've got to take the radius down. So this radius is about the size of the pixels of sharpening. If that makes sense. So the smaller the number, the finer the sharpening detail is, but it gives a more realistic look without fragmenting which you don't really want. It doesn't look good. And then I'll bring up the detail just a tad to about 35. And then when masking, I'll hold down the option key and just drag this across until it's selecting around the outlines of the area. So you can see here at masking 70, it's masking around the outside of the mountain. It's masking the plants, but it's not masking the deepest shadows. And it's not masking the water or the sky, which is what we want so that it doesn't create noise or fragmentation. And because we have boosted the shadows, I'm just going to bring up the luminance, a small amount, going back up to detail. And now I'm happy with that unknown to leave affects alone, leave the vignette at 0. And if I push the backslash key, you can see the before and after of what we had. Alright, so with this selected, I'm going to press command c for copy. Check all because we want to copy everything. Hit Copy. Go across to our next image. So this is the mid ground sharp image. Press Command V for paste. And that pace all our exact same setting. And then finally crossed to a third image Command V again. And there it is. So now the mountain is nice and sharp. The mid ground is nice and sharp in here. And a foreground is nice and sharp. And that is what we want. Now, I'm going to do one last edit on this bit. Hey, we're going to go over into the Develop module again. This time, I'm going to just go through what we were doing before. So I go through the lens corrections, go through the camera calibration. And I want to bring this up, the exposure up just a bit. So I'll bring it up to about, they're bringing the highlights down. And that looks a bit better than it did as you go along. You can always hit before and after just to see what work you've done. And now we're only looking to edit the sky. You don't need to worry about this full room. We've already got the foreground sorted. So I'm going to bring the shadows down, bring the whites up. So it is unless what point in there and bring the blacks down. So there's a black point to just add a small amount of contrast to saturate those Blues while still keeping natural color tone before and after. You can see this just brought up that sky little bit more, which is what we wanted. But it hasn't overtaken how look on the mountain. So here the sky has gone quite doc. That's because I didn't do it as bright. And the last edit. But he sky still quite bright. But that is just the perfect scar that I want to be able to blend in a portion of it, G, to go back to grid view. And now I'm just going to select all of my images by holding the command key and just tapping on each one. And I did that so that I didn't highlight this one. Whereas you could do shift doing that. Anyway, I'll right-click edit in open as lays in Photoshop. Now, this is going to bring up this message. It, this probably won't come up for most of you. But if it does just to open anyway, we don't need to use camera roll filter. That's what we use, Lightroom full. This is going to open need images inside of Photoshop. I'll just let this do its thing. I'll time-lapse through it a little bit and come back. Ones are unloaded. Alright, now that we're inside of Photoshop, I've got all the layers here, but they're all out of order. So if I select the little I though go away and they're not in the order that I want them in. So I like to edit in the order that they're going to be in terms of layer. So this is going to be our base layer, drag it down to the bottom. And of course this will be a top layer. 24. So too is our mid ground exposure because I know that that was taken before the sky shot was taken. Ok, so now that we've got all of our layers in order that we are going to be editing them in. I'm just going to take the eye off so I can see the underlying layers here and here. And I'll just select both of those so you can either hold Command or shift or control shift. And just select both of these because we're doing a focus stack on these two. I wanted to do this first. So select both of them, go up to edit auto, align layers. Leave it on auto. You don't need to worry about vignette removal or geometric distortion. Hit OK. And that is just going to align these two lines. They are perfectly matched. Now that they are, we can do this Focus stack with these two images. So let's go back up to edit. Auto blend layers. I always leave seamless tones and colors ticked and stack images is the option you want. Content aware, Phil, that's just if you've got really misaligned liars, it's got some outside bits, but are usually crop that off anyway, so it will be on ticked, then I'll hit OK. So this is going to blend both of these layers together. And here it is, got how the masks look. So white reveals, black conceals. If I zoom in, just hold command and press the plus key, I can zoom in to about here. So I know that this was out of focus before and this was in-focus on top layer. Turn it off. You can see that if I turn that one off, sorry. You can see what it's actually blended. This area was sharp when we did the first shot for our Focus stack. And then if I turn that, whoops, turn that on, you can see how different it looks. Okay, so that's done with these two layers still. Well, just quickly, I'll also take that back. So press command 0 and then I just do a command minus just a zoom out just a little bit. So with these two done and still selected on the liar panel, I'm going to leave them selected and press command G0 is just going to group them into one spot. So if we apply a mask, which we will later on, this will be the one that we apply it to, not the individual layers. And how just rename that so that actually know what looking at. So just to focus stack backgrounds. And I'll just leave that as it is. All right. Here is where we start to get into the focal length blend. It's a paternalist off and on. You can see how the plant looks and how the mountain looks. I'm going to turn the opacity of this group down first and to turn it down to about 60%. So we can still see what it actually looks like. And you can start to see some of the underlying layer. Now we're going to go up to the top left here and click on the Move panel. And the Move option will allow us to move selected layer. And this is where we can adjust. Now what I'm looking for here is to match up these lines. And they do match up pretty well right about here. And sometimes it may take a bit more adjusting the NES, but I'll just get this dead right in a way that we wanted to write about there. Now for turn this up to 100 again, you can see the overlying layer properly and turn it off and on. And if you're happy with how that is starting to look, which I am in this case, you can apply a mask. Now this mask, we're going to leave this last selected. Come down here to the masking option. I'll hold the option key and press on that. That creates a black mask. So that's completely masked out what was there. So I've attended often on doesn't matter. There's nothing revealed. As I said before, black conceals, white reveals. And now we'll go over into the Brush tool just hitting the B key on the keyboard. And to make these brush bigger or smaller quickly on the keyboard, I use the square bracket keys. And it's a very nifty little shortcut. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to do a quick brush over. Make sure your foreground color is selected as white because we want to reveal the top layer. Now, just start painting out some of this top lay here. And that was actually a pretty good quick blend. And you can already see the vision of the image that we're starting to create. I've turn it off and on again. You can see how it's starting to look. And with the vision of the image that I have, I want these trees on the shore to be that little bit bigger than what they were back here. They look quite small and opinion it doesn't give the right scale of size. So I'm going to leave that as it is. Now here is where it gets into the little bit of a tricky part. And we want to start masking out some of the bushes to bring in some of the bushes that are a little bit bigger. And we can do this, it is quite simple. On your brush. Keep the hardness slightly lower, so let's say around 30%. And then we can just zoom in. And on, store selected on unmask. Just paint in where some of the other bushes were. So you can see where the bushes were there. We're just going to paint over some of them. Now the good thing. This image is these grasses actually starts to look quite like each other no matter what focal length rat, which is a very, very handy. So I'll just painting a little bit more in here. And this is where it starts to get tricky just with sharp images or not. And paint over just ten mL. So you can see it'll start to bring through the shop of versions of the image that we have on the Overlay layout. But I don't want to move any of this bush because I know that that is nice and shop. And potentially just bring in a little bit more of the bush here. I think that's gone a bit too far. Might just remove some of that. Just paint over some of there so that where that was slightly darker there, that's actually made a shadow on the overlying layer. And these are the types of things you want to watch for. So here I'm going back to white and just a quick change key for these shortcut is just x. It's very, very simple. And it gets through everything pretty quickly once you get used to doing it. Now here, I've gone a little bit over, and that's all right in there. And of course, we can change these as we go along. So if I turn this off and on, you'll see how this is actually starting to look quite natural, which is nice. It's what we want. And the light is still coming in from the same direction. That is DOP shadows down here. The shadows in here, the lights hitting the Bush, hitting the bushes, and also hitting the sky, which is exactly what we need it. Ok, so I'm pretty happy with how this focal length blend is looking so far. The last thing we need to do is bring in the sky. So the sky frame, we're going to do the same thing as what we did before. I'm going to select this sky layer. Click on the Move Tool, drop the opacity down to about 60%, will just align the mountain. See how it snaps sort of straight into place. Exactly what we want to increase the capacity again, because I know that that's in place. I'll push the Bk just so it goes to the brush so I don't accidentally move it again. But here, the way we come into luminosity masking up, hey, I've got a little plug-in option for easy panel. This may come up in a slightly different location for you. The video that comes with this downloaded is free, is very good on showing you how to install it. That's actually how I learned to install it. So just click on the plug-in option that is going to bring up these options heat. So easy panel actions by Jimmy McIntyre. He's a very good Photoshop tutorial list. If you want to call them that, that hey, we're going to leave this doc Elias selected. So it gives us a nicer blend and click on Create luminosity. Mosques. And this is just going to bring up a whole bunch of marching ants. You just press Command D that would deselect them, close that panel off, and create your first your black mask on this layer. So hold option, select on that option again, and that will create your black mask. Now we go over here into channels, and here is where we have all of our luminosity masks. This is really good. This tool, I love it. And now we can go through and select which one looks best and see how it's gone completely grayscales going black and white. And you can see this slight graying, slight or this white color up here. It's the same principle as we had before. Black conceals, white reveals. Now, I'm not worried about here because I'm not going to be blending anything in there to zoom in. And I'll just go through and find which one works best. Now brought S3 is pretty good. I'm quite happy with this, but I want to make a few adjustments. So with bright three clicked on, come up here to image adjustments and levels. This will bring up a Levels adjustment that we'll just work on this luminosity mask, which is fantastic. It's a great little trick. Now this may seem a little bit confusing. I know. Just keep rewatching the tutorial and following along. I hope that I'm explaining it well enough for you to understand it fully. But this is just the introduction into how to use them. There's so much more that you can do, but this is a very basic version of it for you. Now, let's bring down these whites on the right-hand side. And that is going to bring up all of this detail. And then we'll bring up, down, sorry, the mid tones. And that is going to make the sky pure. What if I bring out some of the blacks here? See how it starts to phase out on the edge of the mountain. That is what we want. We don't want any of a mountain to be able to be selected. And now there is a little bit of snow here and I'm going to have to be careful when I blend this. But I'm happy with how this mosque is looking, this bit of midtone in here, so it's slightly gray. This is pure white, but I'm happy with this. We won't be blending the full detail of the sky. So I'll hit OK. And then I'll press Command, click on brights. Three. Go back over to layer. Click on the luminosities on the black Lyon mosque that you've got. And press command that will hide the marching ants. Now they still there. They will still be there to paint with, but they just hide them so they don't look. So we'd now if I press x to select what, you can also click this little arrow key. But I'm painting with white on the black mosque in the top here. And we have to change the opacity of the brush. 20% or 21. And my hardness is going to get dropped a little bit more to about 15 to 17%. And this is what we want. We want to slowly blend this in rather than do just one big giant blend. So let's just start painting in on the sky. You can see if I paint down here, it's not going to have any effect at all. But up here, if I keep painting, you may not be able to see much happening at the moment. That perfectly okay. The whole trick is you don't need to see everything that's happening until turn off and on. And you can see how that's brought in just that little bit more detail into the sky and the area that we wanted it to come into. So just do this a little bit more paint over it maybe a couple of times, but you're just doing this until you get it. The way that you're wanting it to look phi often on, you can see how much of a difference has really made. Press command 0, just to go back to full screen, zoom out just a little bit more often on stage really brought out those blues that contrast highlight really worked for us. And that is a quick luminosity mask blend just for a sky, which worked great for tricky things like mountain tops or rocks, whatever it may be. If you've got an uneven horizon, luminosity mask blending will work really, really well. Okay, so if I press option and just click on the little, i will show you a before and after of what we started on before we did our first adjustments to this layer. And I'm pretty happy with how this is looking. So let's go into just starting, finish. This image of image looking the way that we wanted to. It's time to finish the image. And he is a little bit of the process. Sometimes I do all of these, sometimes I don't, sometimes I do a bit more. Just depends on what the image is. But the first thing I'm going to do is make sure that the luminosity mask is D selected. So I'm going to press Command D to make sure that's de-selected are Us when I go to paint in DOJ, my Dodge and Burn, which I'll show you how to set up next. It will only do the sky area where it's selected and really affect any of this down here. Now, I have made this error before and I was wondering why it didn't actually for me. So I just wanted to make sure that I mentioned that because it is a very easy thing to miss. And if you miss it, you're wonder why nothing's happening. So anyway, let's get into this Dodge and Burn layer. So I'll come down here to the new lab tab. And I'll simply select both of these first, I'll just hold the Shift key clicked on the other layer and to change the blend mode to soft light. And that is how we wanted that takes away that real paintbrush feel to it and sort of gives it that nice soft toning, which is what we want. I'll rename my lines here. And this is a good habit to get into sometimes on not very good at it. Like hey, I could have nine this sky and name this focus, that background. I couldn't name this foreground, but I knew what Jordan said. This isn't a very complicated blend. So Dodge and Burn, I'll stop on the Dodge life first and I'm going to press the became max from selected on the brush over here. And now what I'll do is I'll zoom in just pressing Command Plus. And I'll come down to, he had to start with. And what I'm going to do is I'm gonna hold Option. And just simply hover over the plant until I find the ROTC color. Now come up here to the color panel and are just increase the brightness a little bit. Decrease my brush size, and then take down the opacity. We're gonna take this down and really nice and low. So probably around 8%, some way that's very low. We can just slowly paint. I'll move up this to increase the brightness on the broad areas. Now press N to make sure that's selected. And I'm going to change the hardness is actually pretty low already I was gone, thought it was a bit high. That's okay. Just taking this down to a very low number, you can leave it at 110, just take it down to ten. Just to show you where it is. Here. We're just going to make sure this is selected. And then we'll stop painting over the highlighted areas and you can see how that's already bringing up a little bit more of that color. Do nice and gently, just so that we get a nice, even tiny throughout the entire image. And we only want to do dodging on the broad areas that makes sense because that is what this is all about. Now because we're using an 8% opacity brush, you just have to keep going over it until you're happy with how the effect looks. And usually, I'll like to take it just that little bit other than he's actually needed. And then I'll reduce the opacity of the layer so that it's not as prominent. Now we've only done this plant here and we've only touched it. And if I turn that off and on in, see how much of a difference as really had on the image already. So I missed a little bit in there. Just touch up there. Some of these areas are just bring up a little bit more just in here, the sort of midtone colors. And I'll go into the shadows when we do the burn lab next. All right, now we don't really need to keep one single column for this. That's the great thing about dodging and burning in Photoshop. You can do a whole variety of colors on a single lab. Now, we've got all these lovely grasses and the trees, and the mountains, and the hills and everything. So if I just go and select this weight color, increase the color a little bit. I'll simply just paint over here. And I'll just keep doing this until I've painted over the highlighted areas or the brighter areas inside of a shot. Now in hey, you can see that we've got to shadow forming it. That was a nice little shadow form just under here. We're going to leave that alone and we got to give that a little bit more contrast with the starch and burn. So I'm just going to keep painting. Keep painting until I'm pretty happy with how the effect looks right about now. So if I turn it off and on, you can see how much brighter but still natural-looking. These plants now look. As we get further back into the image. Just press command plus zoom in and time to change color again. So I'll go with sort of slimy green color, increase the brightness of touch, and then decrease the brush size and just stop painting over. And you can adapt, Carlos just that little bit. You've got that little bit of leeway because it's not a high capacity. You don't have to thoroughly change a color consistently. So as we went Dhaka here, I'm just change to a slightly darker color. As you're going along. You can just turn it off and on. You can see what's really happening here. And this is starting to look fantastic. So change color again. Oops, that was a bit of a slightly brighter color there. Increase that. And then paint onto the tops of these bushes along the waterline. Again, we've got that Dhaka tree collar. Just select a darker color, increased at a touch. And if you add a little bit more warmth into it as well, that starts to give more of that sunset effect when we weren't shooting in golden hour anyway. But you just want to enhance it that little bit more. So if I turn off and on, you can see what we're doing here. And personally, I am a fan of how this is starting to come together. A color enhancement is just that perfect amount. Okay, so as we get onto the mountains in the background here, and as I'm moving around as well, I'm just holding the space bar to change it to the hand and dragging around. Hold option. Select my colleagues, sort of choose a slightly warm gray. And then we'll just increase that a little bit more. So we'll just keep going along painting. Now, plants here change color again to sort of military green, increase the brightness. And you want to be careful in some of these areas just to try and avoid going into some of the shadows. And we'll just paint along here. You can see there's a nice big shutter here, so I'll avoid painting on that. And then we'll do the Burn layer on there shortly. Keep painting. And I'm going through this pretty quickly just for the video to make sure that it doesn't end up being maybe an hour and a half long. Hopefully it won't go that long. And now we get to the mountains. So I hold option again, select the cola, increase, the brightness of it. And then we'll just stop painting this column onto the bright area. And you can see that I'm just going along the edge of where that shadow is and the shadows in here. So we will do the rock face separately. And I'll just make a bigger brush just so he can speed through this, increase that turn off and on. You can see this had a very slight color change. And then we might just go over once more just to enhance it that extra little bit. And here as well, snow, we can actually increase the brightness of the snow, which is good. If I just hold Alt, select that, take it all the way up to pure white, and this is really starting to pixel in the image. So just ignore how grainy it is. And we'll just paint over the snowy areas. Keep going. And that's looking much better. And an often on, you can see that we've really had a nice effect, increasing the golden hour look. And now on to the rock face option, select, increase the color. My D saturate. Just a touch by bringing multiple White and paint over the rock face. Now here, there's more crevices in the rock, so you've got to be a little bit more careful, just dodging and burning through here. And again, I am speeding through this. I am trying to still be quite careful on it and just making sure we get the right color effect happening. And we'll just do some of these smaller bits. O in here. I'll turn this off and on and see that that's just brought up the brightness of it a little bit. That's exactly what we wanted because here is the same color tone we can just trends, translate the color across and keep painting onto these ridge lines now with mountains and stuff, this technique works really well. This focal length blending technique works really, really well. With mountains you just getting that light and shadow in contrast and nice can help the image to really pop just that little bit more. I've changed color, just doing some final last minute details. I'll do a little bit on here. And I'll increase the brightness D saturated. Just a touch and paint onto this area here. Ok, so I'm pretty happy with how that looks. Colors looking good. Command 0 to zoom out, and this is just our dodge lab. They can see how much effect we've really had on this image so far. And we haven't even done burn yet, which really draws out that contrast. So got onto burn. And this time we're going to be targeting the dock areas. And we'll just push option, select the color. Now this is going to be very DOT collars. It'll most likely be black in a lot of cases. And we'll just simply stop painting into the dock areas. So just keep going. Just painting around some of the bushes. Not being too particular. Just in this area. Because if I did, it would take forever. And also a lot of these branches out in shadow. So it's okay to make them just that extra bit Dhaka, zoom out a little, turn burn off. You can see what effect we've actually had. Missed a couple of little spots in here. That's a write off, just doc and them down just a bit more. And the more shadow you have, the more contrast you create. So just paint it more into here. You can see where there's light. You just want to leave that just a little bit less than what the rest of the shadow burning is. And he, Let's go into here. So make this sort of a jock yellow line, yellow type color. Just so it keeps that nice natural contrast of color as well as light and shadow. Just keep painting into the areas around here. And I'm just going to keep zooming through this. Probably won't change color as much if I do, it won't be much variation in color. So I will time-lapse through just a little bit of this so that you don't have to sit here and watch me painting around a bush. Alright, so now that I've done that, the majority of the big stuff and I've sort of zoomed through this a little bit. I'll do this area in side the mountain reach line. I'll select a colour. Just bring it down a little bit, making, maybe make it a little bit more blue. Shadows are very blue. So and increase or decrease the brightness. But you can also increase the richness of blues or you can keep sort of along a straight line, keep it dark, but still keep that little blue tinge to it because it does give it that nice, cooler color contrast. Paint carefully around the mountain edges, just so that we get a nice even cover split between there. And I don't paint onto the highlight gives a nice natural contrast. I'll do the same thing here. Painting davka into this area. And yes, is still a little bit blue. That is OK. I'm happy with how these results are starting to look. Turn off and on, voice check your work as you go along. You can see how that was a slightly lighter blue. And as we document, it still has that richness of the blue while keeping that contrast and natural shadow. So this is fantastic trick, can sometimes take a bit of time depending on what sort of image you're editing. Sometimes very quick, sometimes it's a little bit slower, like this process because we're doing so much intricate detail. Alright, so I think we are good with that. And turn it off and on. You can see what Bernie has done, you can see what Dodge has done. And I select both of these lies either press shift or commands like both of them. Press command G that will form them into group sign is what we did with the Focus stack. And I'll call this Dodge and Burn. Now if I turn these off and on and see how much contrast they really add into the image. And I'm quite happy with how that is looking and might decrease the capacity of them just to about Eighty-five percent of 84. And that just takes away a little bit of that effect that was slightly, slightly overdone. It can still go in and change the opacity of each one individually. But together, they're both at 84%. Okay, so I'm, I'm happy with how this image looks. There's just a couple of little things that I want to do before we finish on the keyboard on entrepreneurs Command, Option Shift e. And that is going to merge all the layers that we've got here into one lay here and not call this shopping. This is how you get. Those are really nice and crisp sharp images. So with that layer selected, come up to filter other high POS. Now a good ratio for this filter, which brings out the detail in the image, is to keep it between two to four. Usually I'll stick at about 2.5 to 3.2, somewhere in there. I find that's pretty good to me, but if you overdo the effect, so let's just leave it at three and hit, okay, that will apply the high-pass filter up. You want to change the blend mode to overlay. And we zoom in. You can see that that actually looks pretty over sharpened. But if I turn it off and on, makes the other image look almost soft. So if I decrease the opacity to about 65%, see what that does. That brings the effects a little bit more realism. I'll take it to 60 and I'll leave it there. Now, we don't need to shop and this guy, we just simply done it. So a very quick way to create a mask that will select out just the sky without going through the whole process again, it's come down here. Select the mask that we did for the sky so that we know that justice guy selected hold the option key and drag that up and drop it onto sharpen. And now black conceals what reveals, as I said before. If I press Command, I invert the mask that will make the base nice and sharp while taking y that sharpening from the sky, which is a handy little trick tonight. And you can see here that just lost a little bit of detail in this grass. When you're looking at it from here, you don't really notice it because they blended. When you start pixel p, you do notice it just a little bit. Still looks relatively natural with the high ones. You can just see a slight edge forming. Now you'd want to primarily primary circumstances, check this before you merge all these layers. But if you do have the sharpened online, it's very easy to just redo. All you do is just delete this one, go into your mask, and then he paint in or out more elements of what you want to do. Ok, So inside of Photoshop, that image is done. If I press the Alt or the Option key and click the little eye, you can see what it was before to what it is now. And it is quite a big difference. I'd much prefer this shot because it has that grandeur of the mountain was still keeping what looks like a wide angle foreground. Now before we do anything else, we've still got a luminosity masks on the channels option. So if you come back into the easy panel plug-in, soon as that comes up, you can click the Delete luminosity mosques option. And down here you'll see how big the file sizes. So it's currently 1.35 gigabytes and that's a pretty decent size image. But if I click delete luminosity mosques, that'll take just a moment and you can see it dropped 500 megabytes or just a little bit more, which is great for saving space, especially if you are doing a significant number of images using luminosity mask, exposure blending, focal length blending, and all the things that you can do inside of Photoshop. Now that's done a press Command S. To save that. It's going to go back across the Light Room where we'll make our final little adjustments and we can finish off the video. Okay, back inside of Lightroom, He is the image that we've just brought over. Press D to go into the developed module. This is where we'll add last little touches or comes straight down here to the effects panel. And straight away, I'm going to add a post crop vignette. This really helps to draw the views IN darkens the corners. And we're on minus 26, so it's a little bit high for turning off and on. You can see what sort of effect it has is darkness guy a little bit, it's probably a bit too far, so I'll take it back to about minus 16, turning off and on. And I'm pretty happy with how that looking at the dock and the frames of the image at darkened the sky little bit it brought the attention into the main subjects of the shot. With that done, the last thing onto is the spot removal tool. You can press Q0, Q on the keyboard, presses visualized spots. I'm just going to increase that amount. And primarily in the skies where you want to focus this attention. Now, select that because there was a lens spot there. Zoom out as another lens, but just up here. Select bad. Get rid of that one. Get rid of this one. Looks like I had a few little spot on the sensor. I think that's another one. Yes, it is. And once this is clean, the image will be done. So I'm happy with that term, visualized spots off done. What ad see what it looks like. We're just a little bit more contrast. That's probably pushing it too much. Maybe to around plus six. And I am happy with how that image now looks for the final photograph. I do hope that you have enjoyed this video tutorial on focal length blending, including a little bit of luminosity mosque blending, plus focused stacking and finishing an image inside of Photoshop. If you've enjoyed this, please recommend it to a friend who you think could benefit from doing this course. Also, leave me some feedback. I'd love to know what you think, how to improve and also what you'd like to see in the next course or courses coming from Ryan fallow photography as a link just down below to check out the feedback survey. If you