 earlier this week, the storm started to roll in and the clouds were really, really nice. And it looked like the sunset was going to shape up to be spectacular. So, I checked the TPE app. They have this new thing, a relatively new thing called Skyfire that gives you a percentage of a chance that the sunset is going to be awesome. What I pay attention to is any time it says it's over 80% because then there's a pretty good chance that it's going to happen. Last minute, I decided that I would go up to Skyline. Skyline is this road that stretches from San Jose to San Francisco along the Santa Cruz Mountains separating the Bay Area from the coast. And there's just a bunch of little spots that you can pull out and trails to hike and all sorts of cool stuff. And so, I thought I'd go up there. I came around the corner to this opening where you could see the Pacific Ocean way off in the distance. I really love the layers and the hills and I loved that there was a couple trees. I was hoping the Sun would break through the clouds and blast some light on the hills. That never quite materialized but the sky lit up. It was so good. The sky was so bright and the foreground was so dark that I ended up bracketing about two stops. I was using my Canon 70-200mm f4 lens on my Sony A7R ISO 100 70 mm. I opted to shoot at f8 so I could get the really sharp image. Explosures were 1 15th, a 60th, 1 25th of a second. So, anyway, what I'm going to do is I'm going to start and I'm just going to see what happens. I'm going to merge this into an HDR by using Lightroom. I'm gonna see what happens. Nice. So it's finally done and let's see what it did. I hate this. I hate this too. I don't like. I don't like what it did. So I'll do some basic processing here in Lightroom and then I'm gonna bring it over to Photoshop and manually blend myself. Alright so I'm gonna start with this middle exposure. The colors that I'm seeing here are not nearly as vibrant as they were when I was standing there. I don't like how this trees encroaching on the side. I knew that when I shot the image but I wanted this tree on this part of the frame so I'm gonna have to figure out how to clone that out and I want to bring in some of the layers that you could see here the hills in this lighter exposure. With that being said I'm going to just start moving the sliders around as I think they need to be. In this image I'm really focusing on the sky. I hate bumping the saturation but I'm gonna do it just a hair. I always like to give a little bit of contrast with a tone curve. See what the lens correction does to bueno, bueno. Alright I'm pretty happy with how that sky looks there. I'm literally just going to copy these settings here and bring it over into the next one and see what I'm focusing on in this is just this layer of the hills down here and I'm actually gonna bring it down a lot because I don't like how bright it is here. I want to make out that there's hills down there. Then on this last one it's really just focused on the sky. So there's, here's my three images. Really I bet I could probably get it with just these two but I am going to bring all three in and see what I get. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make this be my base layer. Probably won't even use this layer. Now that I see it in here I think all I need is my base layer. So I'm going to call this my base and I'm going to call this my mountains and you are garbage. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come into my channels and those luminosity masks and I'm going to select one that will best make me a selection of these hills in the front. Megadarx I think does it best. It also does this tree which I don't think I like. I think I just want the hills but I'm going to look at that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to command click this. It's going to select all the areas in white. I'm going to come back over to here and on my mountains layer I'm actually going to apply that mask by clicking the little Japanese flag down here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually go into the mask and I can do some detailed work here again using luminosity masks. I'm going to go into the Megadarx and I'm going to command click again. I'm going to come back over here. I'm going to click on this layer and I'm actually going to option click on it so I can just see the layer here and I'm just going to paint these trees black. Much better. To give it a little boost I'm going to come over to my channels and I'm going to command click on my lights and then I'm going to come back and just do a command J. What that does is it creates a new layer taking the 50% brights as you can see here. Option click on this. You can see that it's just selected the bright parts of this image. What's really cool is when I go back and if you take this layer and you either overlay or soft light usually works best you can see it just bumps the color up. It's really a cool simple trick. I always go back and forth between overlay and soft light. Overlay on this one is a bit more vibrant which I like. If it ends up being too much you can always back off the opacity of that layer and it'll bring down the intensity of it. So now I have to tackle how to get rid of this tree and I'm not very excited about it because it looks like a pain in the butt. I'm going to play with the crop just a bit. See if I can just get rid of that those dang trees. Much better. Done with that. So there's my cleanup, my new crop. I'm actually going to opt to sharpen this thing up a bit more. Just looking at it I love how sharp the tree is but I want to make it really stand out without sharpening the sky. There's another really cool trick that I use a lot using luminosity mask that I'll show you. I'm going to create a flattened image here and it's just going to be sacrificial but I'm going to go to other. I'm going to do high pass. You don't want to go too high on this. It gets like crazy way up here. It just kind of brings out some of the detail. I'm actually going to stick around like fivish and then if you change this to an overlay it sharpens it up. But what that also does is it adds it to the sky. I'm going to create a mask by using the luminosity mask that we created. So I'm going to look for one with some good contrast. This will work best. So I'm going to command click it. I'm going to come back here. I'm going to create the mask and then I'm going to come in and I'm going to go filter, stylize, find edges. Actually let me do this. Option click on it and so it's found the edges of this mask and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my adjustments and my levels and I'm just really going to try and make it to where I only see the edges on this thing. Make it look like an outline like a drawing of that tree. So you can see how it's really only on the tree and the peak of that mountain and that's now my new layer mask. But the problem is is it's backwards right now. It's sharpening everything except for the edges of the tree. While I'm clicked on that mask I can do command I for inverse and now it made it to where only the white part is being sharpened which is perfect. It's very subtle but you can see as I turn it on and off the difference that it made in that tree and just really making it pop. And the last thing that I'll do is just add myself a nice little vignette. I do that in Photoshop by drawing any lips and then I will do a shift command I and that makes it towards selects the outside and then what I'll do is I'll come in here and I'll do a curves adjustment. Now this layer becomes dispensable and I can feather it towards not just a very harsh transition you option click on it you can see the feather on it something like that and then if I go over to here I can drag it down just on this layer to darken the edges. I'm good with that vignette and that's it. Thanks for hanging out. If you love this content please support us by subscribing to our channel. Oh and don't forget to click that thumbs up too. See you soon.