How to combine Focus Merge & Dark Exposure

[MichaelSOL101]

Dear Affinity Users,

I'm heavily struggling to combine 3-off images consisting of a focus merge, a dark exposure for the sky and a stack to smooth the water in the final image. I created the focus merge and the stack separately. The dark exposure for the sky is a single image. I managed to create a prelim image using blend ranges but I'm losing sharpness in the foreground. I would like to maintain the sharpness in the foreground. Is there any clever method on how to combine a focus merge and a darker exposure for the sky? I tried it manually as well with manual image alignment and masking but the result was not satisfactory. All images were shot with the camera on a tripod.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Regards,

Michael

[Old Bruce]

2 hours ago, MichaelSOL101 said:

I'm losing sharpness in the foreground. I would like to maintain the sharpness in the foreground.

What is in the foreground? It may be that you will need to forego the Stacked image for that part. Choose one image that has the foreground nice and sharp and use masks to cut that in overtop the smoothed water.

[MichaelSOL101]

Thanks for your tips Old Bruce. In the foreground is a tree trunk (very sharp because this image was created using the focus merge). I tried already with masking but the result was not satisfactory. I thought I have overlooked some hidden feature in Affinity but it looks like that is not the case. I think I have to accept the degradation in sharpness when using blend ranges. Is it allowed to upload the afphoto-file?

Thanks!

Michael

[Old Bruce]

6 minutes ago, MichaelSOL101 said:

Is it allowed to upload the afphoto-file?

Yes.

[MichaelSOL101]

Ok, I have uploaded the file. Could you have a look at it?

Thanks in advance,

Michael

Final_Exposure_Blending_2.afphoto

[Old Bruce]

There is some weird transparency going on with the layers.

I don't know how you made the layers "Darker Exposure Sky" and "Focus_Merge_Foreground" but they are probably about 30 40 % opacity. This may be causing the problems you are seeing. There is no way to fix this.

I used the layers in the Live Stack Group to make the version I include here. I made a masked version guessing at what you wanted from what you have said. The layers are grouped just so I could label them. You will have to fix the masks as they are just roughly done to show how I would go about it. I changed from 16 to 8 bits because the file was too large for me to upload.

8 bit three layers two masks.afphoto

[MichaelSOL101]

Thanks for your quick response. In understood the masking approach. I already tried this but i'll try again. The transparency results from the blend range settings applied to the first 2-off layers. But i'll try to solve the image with the masking approach again.

Thanks for your support!

Michael