Exposure blending is a popular technique often used to create high dynamic range photography.

This article is about using the same technique but for the purposes of creating an image that contains all of the elements of a scene that you might not have been able to capture in one exposure.

Of course, we would all like to capture what is in our mind’s eye in one exposure and we strive to do so to reduce the amount of time we spend post-processing. But that doesn’t always work out and blending exposures can be a quick and easy way of creating the image you want.

Here’s an example. I was recently visiting Cape Kiwanda on the Oregon coast and I wanted to make a long exposure image that would show the motion of the water rushing back out into the sea before …

A Guest Post by Nick Rains.

Warning – the following is quite advanced (even geeky) and I must assume the reader has a working knowledge of channels, levels, curves, blending modes, tools etc as well as how the main color models work (RGB, Lab, HSB).

Much has been written about converting colour to Black and White: we all know that there are a great many different ways to do this, some more effective than others. Differences between the various methods are usually explained in terms of visual appeal or the ability to blend the various colour channels to emulate traditional B+W filters. What has not been mentioned is exactly why different greyscale conversions give different results, and more importantly, the fact that this principle can be used to make …

By Don Komarechka

One of the biggest challenges facing macro photographers is getting your subject in focus. Not only is hitting the perfect focus point an exercise in frustration, but often you don’t have enough in focus. Unlike a landscape photographer who can set their aperture to F/22 and be happy, a macro shooter will likely be rewarded by blurry images – and even if they are sharp, the focus still won’t magically spread from edge-to-edge. The best solution is to use a technique called “focus stacking”, which combines multiple frames together to increase the area of the image that is in focus.

Focus stacking requires you to photograph your subject at every single possible focus point you’d like to have sharp, and then combining those images together to get one …

by Sarah Hipwell

What is compositing? Simply, it means to combine two or more images to make a single picture.

As a photographer, I’m constantly coming up with different concepts that I feel might make a good photo. But it is not always possible to get the perfect shot in one session. There have been numerous occasions while on a shoot where the light was not bright enough for the particular shot that I had in mind. On other occasions the background was too distracting. This is where the ability to create composite imagery in Photoshop is a huge advantage.

To produce a composite image in Photoshop, you need to isolate the subjects from the background of your various source photos. When I started out, I used the pen tool to help isolate my …

There’s no question that Lightroom is a powerful piece of photo processing software, but due to that power sometimes it’s not as easy to wrap our heads around everything it has to offer, that’s in part why I started my Let’s Edit YouTube series a weekly segment in which I share my own editing workflow for viewers to learn from.

After starting this series one of the most commonly asked questions was to go into more detail on how the sharpening tools in Lightroom work. Sharpening in Lightroom is broken down into four different sliders – Amount, Radius, Detail and Masking – and they each work together to help you achieve the perfect amount of sharpness in your photograph. Today, rather than simply answer this question to the comparatively small group of people over on my site, I thought I’d bring …