Palos Verdes seascape burn

Here’s the final burn from my recent story showing the blending of the sky. I used luminosity masks to both blend and edit. Luminosity masks are based on tones. So a set of masks will give you bright/mid/dark tones. You then layer your bracketed exposures and use one of the light masks to blend the sky onto your darker foreground layer without affecting the foreground too much. With any blending you can’t blend a super bright image on a super dark image without getting some halos and weird artifacting. For example in this shot I took an exposure for the water, then kept increasing 2-3 stops and shot exposures until I got an exposure that has no blown highlights. I’ll then use as many files as I need to blend in the sky gradually. Luminosity masks are also used for my general editing. Midtone editing works very well without blowing out your whites or making your blacks too dark compared to if you just add a global contrast adjustment. Check out vids online from people like Tony Kuyper or Jimmy Mcintyre. Luminosity masks are one of the more complex things to learn in PS but they give you full control of blending without having to resort to HDR programs that can leave your photos looking a bit unnatural with surreal textures and neon colors in the sky. That’s purely preference, but my style is more on the natural side.

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