Graduated ND Filter Effect in Photoshop

[bomboman]

You may have a problem in regard to capture high contrast photos especially landscape photos. When you try to get the right exposure for the sky, the ground bill be dark and you lose details. On the other hand, if you try to get the right exposure for the ground, your sky will be washed out (lost of details). In order to fight with this situation, you may consider using graduated ND filter so you can balance exposure between the sky and the ground but you need to pay extra money for that.

Well, this problem can be solved with Photoshop. Firstly, you need to take photos with RAW format because you can get more information from RAW instead of normal JPG format. Then, you convert your RAW file into 2 JPG files and merge them together by Adobe Photoshop. Anyway, please be informed that this method is good for differences between the sky and the ground just only 2-3 stops. If you have extreme contrast between them, you may need to shoot many exposures and merge them together into one High Dynamic Range photo (HDR).

Let’s take a look of before and after processing.

[bomboman]

1. Adjust your RAW file until you get the right exposure for the ground and then convert your RAW file into a JPG file.

Note: Normally I shot my landscape photos with a little bit over exposure because you can get detail at shadow area and you also have less noise as well.

[bomboman]

2. Adjust your RAW file until you get the right exposure for the sky. For this case, I reduce digital exposure to -2/3 stop in order to get the good exposure of the sky. Then convert your RAW file into a JPG file.

[bomboman]

3. Open both JPG files with Adobe Photoshop. Hold Shift Key and drag the one file to another file. In this case, I drag the dark photo over the bright photo and the reason that you need to hold “Shift Key” because after dragging a file to another file, it will 100% lay over.

[bomboman]

4. In the layer pallet, you can see that you have Layer1 over Background Layer.

[bomboman]

5. Create a layer mask by pushing a create layer mask icon at the layer pallet (see the image below).

[bomboman]

6. Select the linear gradient tool from the tool pallet. Ensure that foreground is black and background is white.

[bomboman]

7. Ensure that you are still in the layer mask. Drag the gradient tool up in order to show the detail of the sky only.

You can also see at the layer pallet you have black mask over the Layer1. This step you need to do trail and error until you get the good transition between Layer1 and Background.

[bomboman]

8. After masking, you can see that this photo has good details between the sky and they ground as if you use a Graduated ND filter.


Any comments and recommendations are always welcome.

[charb_311]

nice work i'm going to do that as soon as i figure out how to convert them into a raw file thank you for all the great tutorials.