Learn How to Blend Exposures in Lightroom

Learning how to properly and convincingly blend exposures will enable you to have much more versatility in your process, particularly when you are dealing with scenes with a high amount of dynamic range. This great video will show you how to use Lightroom for exposure blending and how to ensure your edits are smooth and convincing. 

Coming to you from Perea Photography, this helpful video will show you how to blend exposures using Lightroom. Exposure blending is a very useful technique that you will likely need if you shoot things like landscapes or architecture. As impressive as modern camera sensors are, a lot of scenes still have more dynamic range than those sensors can handle, and as such, you will often have to take multiple shots at different exposure levels (bracketing). Thankfully, it is not particularly difficult to combine those exposures into a final shot, and often, you can do it all in Lightroom without even having to dive into Photoshop. It is a good skill to have to ensure you can get the best possible image quality. Check out the video above for the full rundown and try shooting a scene with high dynamic range yourself. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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9 Comments

30 seconds into this video I knew he’d do HDR blending, which is the WRONG way to do real “exposure blending”, at least if the aim is to come out of it with a believable image.

Hi Edison,

Can you please suggest the right way? I'm trying to blend some real estate images together.

I'd be very grateful for pointers or a helpful tutorial video/article. Please let me know.

This should work well for real estate, if you have Photoshop in addition to LR. Key is to equalize the exposures in LR and then do simple blending in Photoshop.

https://youtu.be/HHVZAt_o8g0

Nothing I can say can be better than one of the real estate photography masters, Nathan Cool, check out his YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_7KM3ANRHy2zhQ_zl-C4XQ

Goes into GREAT detail even there on how to do luminosity blending of real estate photos (which provides the BEST quality), and also has an eBook.

Cheers

The only thing wrong here is this statement mate

How is it 'the only thing wrong here'? His statement is correct - this is an HDR merge (even says so in Lightroom as he's clicking on it), not exposure blending. It is what it is.

Please explain to us how I was wrong (I know I wasn't), would love to hear your explanation...

Are you kidding me? That's a normal HDR blending. Click bait! And I hate these editing via time clock. I don't work at an assemmbly line!

Yeah, I was hoping to learn some cool new thing in Lightroom that I didn't know about, but it was just photo merge in HDR.