Kris Bentham Photography: photoshop

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FMP- Creating a composite

During the night dig I wanted to capture the atmosphere of the dig, working under halogen lighting in the middle of the woods gave a absence and showed the commitment of the progressive liens crew.
I collected a variety of shots altering the exposures to allow me to capture the workers and their halogen lights as well the natural light of the stars.

With a little understanding of how far I can push the exposures in post I chose my exposure to try and keep the quality up. I intentionally selected fast shutter speeds for the the darker shots of the activity to get sharp detailed images. I found the halogen lighting was causing a lens flair that appeared in the sky so in the 4 exposure I block the light with my hand making sure not to cover any of the sky.

I used four of these exposures to make my composite;

The trees around the track
The stars and distant trees, I included these trees are the gave the image distance and added interest away form the build
Is the action shot, While this wasn't the best of all the action shots I had pushed my ISO to 5000 in the other shots so went with this as its at a saver 40000
I used a small patch of this shot the brighten the gap between the lights in 3 and the trees in.

I had produced a quick test composite after the shoot to see if the images would blend together seamlessly, while this achieve the look I wanted the quality needed to be sorted. The noise in the sky is very strong and the blending of the trees and sky is very noticeable.

As I now knew these pictures would blend together I went back to Lightroom and edited them with the mindset of matching exposures, colours and tones. I reduced the exposure of the stars and applied some noise reduction to give a cleaner image. after opening them in Photoshop I aligned the images Starting with the sky I applied a layer mask brushing in the areas I wanted to keep in the image. I paid close attention to the stars as they moved between exposures I made sure I masked duplicate stars off where 2 images were blending together.

I used adjustment layers to tweak individual layers helping the image appear as a whole.

I achieved a much cleaner image paying attention to the stacking and blending on the image. I decided to lighten the bottom left to lead you in to the image, and kept the colours bold intentionally to aid in the printing as its a fairly dark image.

Lens flair removal

I was asked to remove the lens flair from this image as they wanted to print it fairly large.

so theres a few things to things bout when removing the flair;

removing the green tone
applying to texture where the flair has 'blown out'
adding realistic tones
blending the contrast as the flair would give very soft detail.

I started with the image in photoshop, duplicating the layer as a way to preserve the original file i then used a hue and adjustment layer to remove the green tones.

This has left me an area with no colour. To add colour I added a selective colour adjustment layer, this allowed me to add colour to the nuetral tones while keeping the structural detail in the whites and blacks.

The selective colour adjustment layer works with he CMYK colour principle so form the research I did for the 3 layer effect understanding the relationship between these allowed me to quickly select the right tone to blend in with the trail. To help the tones blend i applied it to areas not effected by the flair as well as the colourless patch.

Now i need to deal with the loss of detail due to the blowing out caused by the flair i used the clone stamp to add some more grass around the bike tire, I then used a combination of burning, dodging, curves and contrast adjustment layers to blend the tones below the bikes bottom bracket

I then saved the file and brought it in to Lightroom where I cleaned the images up removing some more of the green tone on the bike and adding clarity to the rock as well as some cloning.

The process worked well, has the flair covered the bike it would have been an near impossible task to remove due to the detail be lost not being easily duplicated.

sRGB

Adobe RGB

Colour Profiles

Im very pleased with the outcome of the image it has a realistic look and tone.
I originally exported the file as Adobe RGB as that the colour profile I use, this resulted is the colours looking a little washed out, tones are slightly off and the shadows are brighter than the original. By keeping the colour profile sRGB as the image was shot I have kept the deep shadows and vibrant orange of the sunset

original image by Andrew Meth-cohn

FMP- Creating a composite

Lens flair removal

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