Hiking Alligator Pond

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Shot these recently hiking in Northern Florida. Comments welcomed.
Black Bird

Walkway

White Bird

Trail

[Geoff F]

All rather difficult scenes although basically OK.

With the first one you have out of focus branches in the top right and bottom right corners. I would crop tighter to exclude them, which will also place more emphasis on the bird.

You have a problem with the sky being over exposed in the Walkway image. Also the bottom right corner water. This would probably have been a good situation for shooting bracketed exposures; or exposing for the brightest areas and then recovering detail from the darker parts which would have been under exposed. It is always better to attempt to improve dark midtones or shadows that to have over exposed highlights which cannot be recovered.

If you are unable to get an improvement from the original I would consider cropping tighter at the top to remove the over exposed parts. The water will probably be capable of being saved.

The white bird has quite a bit of out of focus foliage so I would crop tighter, particularly from the top and left side, to reduce the problem. Birds among foliage are a common difficulty which often cannot be avoided when shooting.

I'm not sure about the last one but I think I would try to simplify the scene by cropping away part of the left side.

[escape]

Thank you, Geoff, for your helpful comment. I have cropped down the Black Bird image and cloned out the blurry moss hanging behind it. Still a work in progress.

I did an exposure stack of these images when I shot them. I figured out how to align them but was unsure how to proceed from there. Will have to google that. I stumble through Photoshop, but I would like to learn and apply it to the Walkway image.

The Whitebird doesn't excite me, so I will drop it

I'm also not sure about the Trail image. It was beautiful to see the moss fluttering in the wind.
Thank you for helping me with how to see these images.

[Geoff F]

With exposure bracketed images, after aligning them, I usually try to arrange the stack with the base image (midtones) at the bottom them a brighter highlights exposure above that and the shadows image at the top. Working on masking with layers can seem difficult at first but once you master the basics it is quite straight forward, until you get into the more complicated stuff.

Your Walkway scene doesn't really need any highlight improvement so I would just use the midtone and shadow layers.

Probably the simplest edit would be to work on the shadows layer and start off by hiding that layer (from the Layers Menu). Then use a basic brush application to selectively paint over the hidden layer and gradually make the required areas visible. Use a soft edged brush around 20 to 30% opacity and keep going over the areas which require darkening. You need a 'white' brush to make those parts visible. A 'black brush' will remove or hide visible areas.

The terms white and black are a initially a bit confusing and refer to the masking effect not actual colours. The left hand toolbar should show which has been selected and you can switch between black and white with this toolbar.

If I was using the highlights layer I would also hide that before doing any editing on the layers.

Another approach which I sometimes use with this sort of scene is to add a gradient mask. Starting with a two layer stack, go to the Layers Menu and select Reveal Layer. Set the mask 'colour' to white. You may need to change the type of gradient from the top toolbar. Click and drag your cursor over the area which will have the gradient. If required, the gradient effect can be tweaked by using black/white brushes.

Gradient masking is initially slightly complicated but you soon get to understand what is possible and it often saves a lot of brushing time when trying to edit large areas with simple brushing. Other masking techniques are available but let's not get overly complicated at this stage.

I sometimes find that Photoshop has auto set my soft brushes to the Dynamic setting which tends to leave hard edges, so I always cancel that option.

But, masking on layers from bracketed exposures can be a problem where there is subject movement which gives 'ghosting' from the movement. In those cases, I just work with the original midtone image and make copies, one adjusted for highlights and another for shadows. There won't be any subject movement when using just one shot as your base image. The copies can then be stacked and masked exactly the same as with bracketed exposures. This method isn't true HDR but I often find it to be an effective alternative.

There are suitable tutorials about using layers and masks with Photoshop. This procedure may start off by appearing complicated but after a little experimentation, and keeping a cool head, everything should soon make sense.

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Thank you, Geoff. I'm printing out your instructive post. I should be able to follow it.