How can I make a blend of two drone shots taken minutes apart look more natural?
Asked 9/23/2021
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2 answers
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I have two very similar drone photos of the same scene taken about 5 minutes apart. The earlier frame has the sky I prefer, but the lower half is much noisier because it was darker. The later frame has much cleaner shadows, so I tried blending the sky from the first image with the foreground from the second.
The result looks unnatural. I suspect the main issues are that the light and color temperature changed between the two shots, and the perspectives may not match perfectly.
If you were editing these, how would you make the blend look more natural? Would you try to match the brighter image to the darker one first, or would you avoid blending and instead recover the shadows from a single frame or process the images as an HDR merge?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
4y ago
2 Answers
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I wouldn't even attempt to overlay two images with such disparate perspectives. I'd take the frame I liked the best [the top one obviously in this case for the sky] & just HDR it.
This is Aurora HDR just at default settings. There are a million tweaks you could make to this, from hardly noticeable to "it hurts my eyes" - but we only have a tiny jpg to work on here; you'll do a lot better from the original image.
Evan Photoshop's Camera RAW can have a good go at pulling detail out of the darker areas - this, 2 minutes work pushing shadows, pulling highlights, then adding a bit of dehaze, sharpening & noise reduction - again, you need to do this on the original.
Photoshop doesn't have the micro-tonality contrast detailing of a dedicated HDR app, though, so it would be hard to get it as crisp whilst also lifting shadows.
There's nothing you can do for the sun itself - that's blown out. There is no detail to recover.
Oddly, the image shows fairly flat 205's right through, so something has already pulled those highlights back; there's still nothing there to recover from the posted image. This makes me think that, compared to your blended image, which does have detail there, something was used to 'fix' it at an earlier stage… which in fact 'broke' it.
Thinking about the blend - I decided what it perhaps needed was some more detail in the mids… so this was a quick go - basically contrast/clarity/haze changes, then lifting the overall lightness a little to compensate.
Originally by user57929. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user57929
4y ago
0
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The main problem is that these frames were taken far enough apart that both the light and likely the perspective changed, so a direct sky/foreground composite can look mismatched.
A better approach is usually to start with the single frame you like best and recover the darker areas from the original file. Raising shadows, lowering highlights, then applying some dehaze, sharpening, and noise reduction can often look more natural than blending two mismatched exposures.
If you have RAW files, merging them as an HDR image is the stronger option. RAW-to-HDR processing gives you more latitude to match tone and detail cleanly than blending small JPEG regions by hand.
If you do keep the blend, first match the two images’ white balance/color temperature and overall brightness before masking them together. If those don’t match, the composite will usually feel “off” even if the alignment is close.
So: 1) try a single-image edit first, 2) use RAW HDR merge if available, and 3) if blending, match color temperature and exposure before compositing.
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