If you’ve been using a digital camera for any length of time, you know what a juggling act it can be to get a photo that’s properly exposed everywhere, from its deepest shadows to its brightest highlights. With most digital cameras, you’re likely to hit the clipping point (Adjusting Tone) in an image much sooner than you want to: If you up the exposure so the shadows are nice and detailed, then about half the time you blow out the highlights. On the other hand, if you adjust the exposure settings down to favor the highlights, then your shadows are murkier than an old Enron annual report. Figure 8-10 shows the problem.
Figure 8-10. Here’s a classic example of the kind of image that can benefit from exposure merging. This photo of an late afternoon balloon launch really needs to be processed three different ways: once for the sky, once for the gorge and the waterfalls, and once for the trees atop the cliffs.
Digital blending is a technique photographers use to get around these limitations. To use it, you bracket your shots, meaning you take two or more identical photos of your subject at different settings—one exposed for shadows and one for highlights—and then combine them, choosing the best bits of each one. People who are fanatical about getting their images truly perfect may combine several different exposures.
That technique is great for landscapes, but if you’re shooting hummingbirds, roller-skating chimps, or toddlers, you know it’s just about impossible to get two identical shots of a moving subject. And if you’re like many people, you may not realize you didn’t capture what you wanted until you see the shot on your computer at home. But even if you only have one photo of that perfect moment, you can sometimes cheat a bit and get a similar result from processing your photo twice in the Raw Converter (once to favor the shadow areas, and once for the highlights) so you wind up with two exposures. The problem is figuring out how to combine them into one great image.
Happily, Elements gives you a super simple way to do this. It’s called Photomerge Exposure, and it’s as easy to use as any of the program’s other photomerge features (see Chapter 11 for more about those). It can even be a one-click fix, if you want. Elements offers you several ways to blend your photos. Your main choice is between an automatic merge, where Elements makes most of the decisions for you, and a manual merge, which gives you more control but requires a little more effort.
Note
Exposure merging isn’t meant for blending two totally different photos together, like replacing the blown out sky in your photo of the Taj Mahal with a good sky from a photo of your dude-ranch trip. To use Photomerge Exposure, your photos should be pretty much identical except for their exposures. So use images you took with your camera’s exposure bracketing feature, or even one shot you’ve processed twice or more to get one good version with properly exposed highlights, one with good shadows, and so on. Sadly, Elements actually does a better job with a single photo processed two ways than it does with multiple shots, so if you don’t like what you get by blending two actual exposures, take the best one, process it two ways, and then use those files as the basis of your merge.
It’s incredibly easy to combine your photos using the Automatic Merge option. Elements makes most of the decisions for you. (If that’s not for you, you can opt for a manual merge, where you call the shots, as explained in the next section.) Here’s what you do:
Prepare, open, and select your images.
You can start with two or more photos where you used exposure bracketing on your camera, or with one image that you processed in two (or more) different ways in the Raw Converter (The Raw Converter), for example, once favoring the shadows and once the highlights.
Elements lets you combine up to 10 photos, so you can create as many different versions as you need to make sure every part of the image is properly exposed. Then select the photos you want to work with in the Project bin, and you’re ready for the next step.
Call up the Photomerge Exposure window.
In Full Edit, go to File→New→Photomerge Exposure, or Guided Edit→Photomerge→Exposure. Either way, the Photomerge Exposure window opens. It’s a lot like the windows for Group Shot, Faces, and Scene Cleaner, if you’ve used any of those before, and it works much the same way.
Tell Elements you want to make an automatic merge.
Most of the time, you’ll already see the final automatically merged image, but if the Exposure Merge window doesn’t open with the Automatic tab active, simply click that tab. (It’s easy to tell which tab is active without even looking at the right side of the window: in Automatic mode you see only one image in the preview area on the left of the screen, while in Manual mode you see two.)
Select a merge option and make any adjustments you want.
On the right side of the Exposure Merge window are two radio buttons that let you choose the type of automatic merge:
Simple Blending. Elements does everything—all you have to do is click Done.
Smart Blending. If you pick this option, you can use the three sliders on the right side of the window to adjust the merge. (The sliders are explained below.) Elements uses a different kind of analysis on your photo here than it does if you opt for the Simple Blending merge, so don’t be surprised if the values in your image shift a bit when you click this radio button.
You can’t use the sliders if you have Simple Blending selected; they only become active when you choose Smart Blending.
When you’re happy with what you see, click Done.
Elements blends the photos as a separate file so that your originals are preserved. Don’t forget to save the blended image.
That’s all there is to it. Elements does a pretty good job, as shown in Figure 8-11 (depending on your photos, of course). But you can help the program by nudging the Smart Blending sliders if you aren’t quite satisfied with what Elements proposes for your image. Here’s what each slider does:
Highlight Details controls the way Elements blends the bright areas of the images.
Shadows adjusts the blend for the darker areas.
Tip
If you’ve used Shadows/Highlights (The Shadows/Highlights Command), you already know everything you need to about these two sliders.
Saturation adjusts the color intensity, which is handy if the blend made your photo look a little drab or oversaturated. It’s similar to the Saturation slider in Quick Fix (Balancing color).
If you prefer to have more control over what Elements does, you can combine your photos manually instead, as explained next.
Figure 8-11. Here’s what Elements proposes as a Simple Merge for the photo shown in Figure 8-10. You’d probably want to tweak it some in the Editor, but overall, Photomerge Exposure did a pretty good job. You can do even better by making a manual merge, where you have more control over how the images blend together. The sky is still a tad light in this version, for instance.
Automatic merges are super easy to do, even for a beginner, but sometimes Elements just doesn’t get it right. Or maybe you just like telling Elements what to do rather than accepting its judgment about your images. Either way, manual merges are what you want.
You begin a manual merge the same way as an automatic one (follow steps 1 and 2 on Automatic Merges). Then, once you have the Photomerge Exposure window open:
Choose to make a manual merge.
On the right side of the Photomerge Exposure window, click the Manual tab if it’s not already active. When you do, Elements changes the window to display spaces for two photos, just like it does for Photomerge Faces, Group Shot, and Scene Cleaner (all described in Chapter 11).
Choose a background photo.
This is the photo that’s going to be the basis of your merge—the one you’ll blend bits of other photos into. Usually, you’ll want to pick the photo with the largest area of correct exposure, though the Tip below describes an exception to this rule. (You can use up to ten photos in a manual merge, but you only work with two at a time.) Drag your background photo of choice into the right-hand slot.
Tip
If you’re blending several exposures, you may get the best results if you choose the photo with the best midtones as your background photo, even if that’s not the photo with the largest properly exposed area. That’s because Elements likes to start from the middle and work out when blending several images (in other words, it works better if you let it figure out the midtones first before making it blend the shadows and highlights).
Choose a foreground photo.
This is the photo you’ll copy bits from to put in the background photo. Double-click it to tell Elements it’s the one you want to use. It appears in the left-hand slot. (Elements sometimes picks a foreground image for you, but it’s not always a good guesser and you may want to override the choice it made.)
Tell Elements what to copy.
Click the Selection Tool button on the right side of the window (the pencil icon) and drag over the areas in the foreground photo that you want to move to the background photo. This tool works like the Quick Selection tool in that it automatically expands the selection from the line or dot you make. If it selects too much or if you drag over something by mistake, use the Eraser tool to remove some of your marks (see Figure 8-12).
If you need to, align the photos.
If your copied material is slightly out of alignment with the background photo (a common problem if you used exposure bracketing for live subjects), scroll down in the Manual tab until you see the Advanced Option header; click it, and then click the Alignment Tool button. When you do, three little target marks appear in each preview when you move your cursor over the photo. Drag the marks so they’re in the same spot in each photo (like over a tiger’s eyes and mouth in bracketed wildlife photos), and then click the Align Photos button. Elements figures out the difference in perspective between the two images and corrects for it.
Figure 8-12. Here’s the midpoint of creating a manual merge of the image in Figure 8-10. (The Show Regions checkbox is turned on here to make it easier to see what Elements is doing.) Here, the trees on the cliffs are being brought over from the left image, as indicated by the yellow mask on the right-hand image. However, the balloon itself is a tad overexposed in spots in the left image, so you might want to go back with the eraser and remove the marks over it so that it doesn’t get copied over, or else zoom the view way in to erase only the blown-out white parts.
You may be horrified by how crudely Elements blends the images at first, but that’s okay. There are two settings in the Manual tab that you can use to fix things:
Repeat with other images, if you wish.
If you want to add details from another image that you preselected, drag it to the foreground image slot and repeat the process. You can keep doing this to combine a total of 10 images. Each additional photo gets a different colored marker to help you keep track of what came from which photo.
When you like what you see, click Done.
As with an automatic merge, Elements creates a new layered file for the blended image so your originals are untouched.
If you need to adjust the view while you’re working on a merge, Elements gives you some help:
Zoom and Hand tools. Your old friends the Zoom and Hand tools live in the little toolbox to the left of the images. They work the same way here as everywhere else in Elements.
Show Strokes. This checkbox in the Merge tab lets you show or hide the marks you make with the Selection tool.
Show Regions. Turn this on and Elements displays a yellow mask over the background photo, with blue over the areas where it’s blending in material from the foreground photo, as you can see in Figure 8-12. The window area is yellow because that’s what’s coming over from the foreground photo. (If you add more photos, each gets a mask colored to match its marker color.)
Tip
Photomerge Exposure is fun, but you may find you want something a bit more powerful. In that case, you should explore HDR (High Dynamic Range) programs and plug-ins. Regardless of whether you have a Windows computer or a Mac, a good place to start is www.hdrlabs.com. Mac folks should also check out Bracketeer from Pangeasoft (www.pangeasoft.net), an excellent exposure-blending program that produces wonderful results.