If you have ever worked with Photoshop, you know what blending modes are. One just can’t get around them. If you haven’t, the blending modes are different options how a layer can behave, in the relation to the layers under it. There are many blending modes, varying from very useful, to not so much. And in this post, I will go through some of them, through the ones I think are most useful when editing photos, and what I use them for.

Soft light

Probably the most useful blending mode of them all. Based on the top layer, it either darkens or brightens the bottom layer. There are other that do the same (Overlay, Hard light), but this one creates the softest effect, which blend the most with a photo. It’s very useful when sharpening the photo (using the high pass filter, as 50% grey has no effect), creating glow (just copy layer, blur and choose soft light), dodging and burning (create new layer, set it to soft light, and paint white where you want to dodge and black where you want to burn) and more. Just duplication the layer and setting it to soft light will add you a lot of contrast and color to a photo. Just tweak it with the opacity slider :)

Soft light

Soft light sharpening

Difference

I don’s use Difference directly as a tool to edit a photo, but it helps in a certain situation. What id does, is to show you the color/brightness difference between two layers. It there is no difference, it is just black. This can be very useful, when trying to align two layers manually. Just set the top layer to difference, and immediately you can see if you are aligned or not. Then just move the top layer with the arrow keys, until you only see a small difference. That will always be there, if you try to align images with different brightness. But you can see on these screenshots, what the difference between aligned and not aligned photos.

Difference aligned

Difference not aligned

Color/Luminosity

These two are a pair, each doing the opposite of the other. The color will show only the color of the top layer, luminosity only brightness values. This is great when you wan to use only one, but not the other. For instance, in these examples, I applied a strong Color Efex tonal contrast on the duplicate of the bottom layer. Once, set to color, it only added saturation. But the second one is more interesting, just set to luminosity, it will add the detail, but the color will not be affected (of course it will be a little different, as you change the brightness).

This is also very useful, when you apply contrast to a photo. You probably noticed, that adding contrast, will also make a photo more saturated. To correct this, one can change the contrast layer to Luminosity, and then it will only affect the contrast.

Color mode

Luminosity mode

Multiply/Screen

A second set of inverse modes. What both do, is to multiple the color of the top and bottom layer. The difference is, that screen inverses the colors first. So if you use Multiply, the result will be always darker, if you use screen, it will be lighter. In editing, I tend to use this in two ways. One is if I just want to darken/brighten the image by one exposure stop. I just create a new curves layer, and set it to Multiply/Screen. I of course than also can tweak the curve, to get exactly what I wanted.

The second is in combination with luminosity masks. Just duplicating a layer, putting a brights luminosity mask on it, and setting the blending mode to Multiply. This will very nicely darken all the bright areas, and also add to their color. This can create very nice effects on clouds and the sky. Of course one can also do the opposite with dark’s mask and Screen mode.

Multiply

Screen

Lighten/Darken

And a last series. Again doing the opposite to each other. Both compare the top and bottom layer. The lighten, will always choose the brigher pixel from each, and use that. The darken, will always choose the darker. In the example, I combined a HDR result with one of the original exposures. This is actually exactly how I use this blending mode. Once you have a HDR, and you want to give it a little more natural feel, you can use this. For instace, if you have white objects in your photos, just use the exposure where they look the best, and use Lighten as the mode. They will be replaced, as in HDR white is usually darker, but other parts of the photo wont be affected.

Lighten

Darken

You can of course tweak all the blend strengths by changing the opacity of the top layer, and also by using layer masks, and painting the effect just where you need it.

Feel free if you have any question about any of this :) And if you can’t find the blend modes in Photoshop, here is a screenshot of where to look for them, and the photo with no modes applied to compare.

Oh.. is it Monday again? So again time for a process post here :) For today, I will show you how I edited this photo of the Dubai marina, taken from the Palm Jumeirah, sometime around midnight. So lets start :)

Let’s first take a look at the finished photo and the starting 0Ev exposure.

Finished photo

Original 0Ev exposure

As you can see, based on the camera light meter, the photo would be just too bright. I took only 4 exposure for it because of that, as I was certain, I would just not need the +2Ev exposures. So as always, I opened all in Lightroom, where I corrected the purple ting and changed to a little warmer color balance. Also I removed chromatic aberrations and corrected the horizon line.

All exposures

Tweaked in Lighroom

From there, I exported everything as 16-bit tiff files and opened in Oloneo Photoengine. Added strenght, a lot of contrast and made the photo even warmer. From there I loaded everything into Photoshop and continued from there (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. -2EV exposure, to darken few bright spots n the photo
3. +1Ev exposure, to brighten few areas that were still too dark
4. removed noise using Imagenomic Noiseware
5. wanted to go for a more softer feel, so used motion blur for the whole image and then masked it only onto the water
6. added overall more contrast to the photo
7. added even more contrast to the water, and few areas on the buildings

Combined in Photoengine

Photoshop edit

And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here:

One usually only needs to edit a photo, but from time to time it can happen, that one also need to edit the exif data directly. And here I don’t mean stuff like the creator info, or copyright information. I mean the exposure time, aperture, iso and similar. You may be wondering when this is required. The answer is simple. Especially in HDR, there are applications (Oloneo Photoengine, Photomatix Pro, PtGui and more) that need to access this information, so they will be able to blend the images correctly. In some of them, like the Photomatix pro, you can override this information, but in other you are depended on it. And it can easily happen, that you have to use an exposure modified in Lightroom, or you used bad settings on your camera, and you just need to change one of the values in exif.

For me this situation happens mostly, when I create HDR panoramas. If you look through my guide on how to do this, you will see that I use PTgui for this. But if one wants to save the result as blended planes, PTgui had to recognize the set of images as HDR brackets. For this to work, each set has to have the exact same values, especially same exposure time. And for some reason, when I take multiple series with the same settings, sometimes, the time on one or more is off. Like having 15s instead of 16s and similar. Not sure if this is a problem with Magic lantern firmware or Canon firmware, but it happens, and so I need to correct it.

 
The software I use for that is called PhotoMe. It’s a freeware that can be found and dowloaded from http://www.photome.de/. It’s a very handy tool, and it allows to see and to edit all of the information in the exif and then save it back as a raw file. Don’t be scared off that the latest version is from 2009. It still works fine, and from the software itself, you get updated until 2012. It works fine for all the RAW files I tried, but if you have a much newer camera, I would suggest to try  first, if the RAW are supported.

 
Using the software is very easy. You just select the file you want to edit, change the values, either by rewriting them, or choosing from the list of available options, and save as new file. It can’t be easier.

I hope this helps you if you ever need to change the exif, and feel free to suggest other software that can do this, if you know any.

When I was writing the 11 tips for Lightroom, I also thought to include how one works with 32-bit files in Lightroom. But as this is a little bigger subject, in the end I decided to give it a separate blog post. So here it is.

Lightroom is a great photo editing too, and since few versions ago, it can also edit 32-bit tiff files. If you remember my What is HDR post, 32-bit files can contain a huge dynamic range, so being able to edit them directly can create some very nice results.

Of course, same as with all the different ways of editing, it’s not perfect, and does not work well for every photo. But it’s an interesting technique and I suggest you give it a try.

So how to do it?

1. Merge the files in Photoshop

Yes, you still need Photoshop (or Photomatix Pro or other program that can create 32-bit files), as Lightroom can edit 32-bit files, but can’t create them. So first, once you select the files you want to merge, I would suggest correcting chromatic aberrations and lens distortions. You can do this also alter, but the results are not so good.

Choose merge to HDR Pro

Merge to HDR dialog

After that, select all the brackets, right click on one and choose Merge to HDR in Photoshop. Once you do this, all the files will be exported into Photoshop and the Merge to HDR dialog will open. Here you will probably see the 16-bit version, but that’s not what we need. Change to the 32-bit mode and just confirm (in the case you need to remove ghosting, choose also that option).

32-bit file in Photoshop

Save as 32-bit

The file will be opened in Photoshop in 32-bit mode, and can be saved as a 32-bit tiff file from there.

2. Merge the files in Photomatix Pro

Another option to create a 32-bit tiff file, is to use Photomatix Pro. Just exporet the files you want to merge from Lightroom, or use RAW, and open them in Photomatix. What you need to do, is check the Show 32-bit image and choose merge. In few seconds, you will see the 32-bit file, which you can save as 32-bit tiff.

Merge in Photomatix

Save as 32-bit tiff

You can also find a Lightroom plugin from Photomatix, that does this step directly and you never have to leave Lightroom. You can find it here: Merge to 32-bit Plugin

3. Edit the 32-bit file in Lightroom

Once you have the 32-bit tiff file, you can import it back into Lightroom. You will see that nothing changes in the interface, and you can edit it as any other photo. The only change that is there, is that the Exposure slider goes from -10 to +10 instead of -5 to +5.

Negative exposure

Positive exposure

You will notice, that you can go really to extremes with all the sliders, and still you get a lot of detail and very little noise. That’s because, where Lightroom normally tries to works with information, that is not in a photo. But with the 32-bit file, there is just much more of it there.

32-bit tiff file, with no edits

After few edits (but could be better :))

So from here you can use any of the tools available in Lightroom, to get the result you want. But before you start, I suggest playing a little with the Exposure, and find a good start in that huge dynamic range. For some photos it can happen, that you will start with a completely dark or white photo, so just move the slider up/down until it’s ok.

As every Monday, also this one I’m sharing with you another processing post. For today I chosen a photo from Paris, of the Eiffel tower, taken from the Tour Montparnasse. So let’s start.

As always here is first a look at the finished and the starting image. As you can see, I didn’t need that much to change, as the photo was quite alright already from the start. It just needed more detail, contrast, and few tweaks here and there.

Finished photo

Original photo

For this photo, I took 5 exposures, but I didn’t need all of them. In the end I just used two. I think I mentioned it in my Oloneo Photoengine tips, that if one does not need exposures, one should not use them. More exposures will just lead to more ghosting and a less sharper image.

All 5 exposures

Editing in Oloneo Photoengine

So I continued by few tweaks in Lightroom, removed chromatic aberations and corrected the horizon line. I then exported the two exposures I needed and opened them in Oloneo Photoengine. There I created two versions, one for the city (natural mode on) and one for the sky (natural mode off). I could have of course use also a different approach, like manual blend, but this is what I did :)

1st Photoengine result

2nd Photoengine result

From there I loaded these two versions and the -1EV image into Photoshop. There I did the following edits (layers numbered from bottom up)

1. 1st Oloneo Photoengine result
2. 2nd Oloneo Photoengine resutls, masked out to only show the sky and the tower
3. -1EV exposure, to correct a little ghosting of the cars in the foreground
4. Retouched out the light streak that was on the bottom of the photo.
5. Noise reduction using Imagenomic Noiseware.
6. Added more overall contrast
7. Added more contrast to the buildings in the distance, to make them more dominant
8. Removed a little color from the tower by using the 1st Oloneo result
9. Color efex Pro contrast to add a little more detail to the city (but I ended changing the opacity of the layer to 25% :))

 
And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here: