When to use Exposure Fusion

Let's see about that image for a second. I'll process it and apply a few finishing touches. And we'll save it. In this case, I just finished processing that using the tone map method, but there is one other method available and that's the ability to essentially merge multiple exposures together. Much like if you were to shoot these and bring them into an application like Photoshop and use complex masking tools to keep parts of one image and blend it with parts of another.

But Photomatics makes this process much easier. Now, I don't have to reload and realign that image. I could just chose to redo this image by clicking here and say Redo with Other Settings. Note, I can now switch my method to Exposure Fusion, which tends to be more natural. Let's take a look at the original files for a second. You'll notice in these images, we have a lot of different details at different points coming through as we opened up that camera.

For example, when we're really underexposed, some of the details are coming through. And it's about here that I like most of the skyline, but I do like some of those brighter highlights. Well, by using Exposure Fusion, I have the ability to work with these. And you'll see, pretty simple. I can use a very natural type look. Go with something a little bit more popular for real estate, which tends to optimize the range there. And I think that actually looks pretty good in this case. Now, there are several other choices and we're going to explore those more in a later lesson.

But for now, if you just want to get a very natural looking image, Exposure fusion is very much a popular choice. And it's not really much of a HDR image. Essentially, you are just combining best parts of all the photos and finding the balance. And with these controls here, you could separately do things like lift up the highlights to get nice bright colors, pull down the shadows to get those rich blacks. Find a good balance there that works for you. Looks pretty good.

And then apply some localized contrast to really bring out the detail. I could play with the depth controls there, and total saturation, and that looks very good to me. I'm going to go ahead and apply that to send it out. I think that looks pretty good. And I'll save that image for further use.