Feathering question

[CarrotMan]

I’ve had a look at some posts but didn’t seem to find a specific answer to this.

I often make two conversions from a single raw landscape photo, one for the sky and one for the land, and then combine them. In Photoshop Elements I copy and paste the “land” version over the “sky” version, select the sky, feather the edge c. 150 px and then delete the overexposed sky to reveal the sky I want, nicely merged into the correctly exposed land.

My question is in two parts:

1) Can the edge in AP be feathered by as much as 150 px (Photoshop allows even more). AP seems to allow a max of 100 px though I may be mistaken. What settings should I use in the dialog box?

2) Perhaps more significantly, can I do the whole combining exposures thing less laboriously? I must confess that I’m not really au fait with masking but feel I should try to get to grips with it.

BTW, I have done some 3 exposure HDR merges (building interiors shot with tripod) and I am very happy with the results, but didn’t want to do pseudo HDR from one raw with my landscapes.

Thanks,

C

[firstdefence]

You can try the Blend Ranges option, here is a video to show what it can do and just happens to use a sky replacement as an example.

 

[firstdefence]

This one specifically demonstrates sky replacement.

 

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, CarrotMan said:

1) Can the edge in AP be feathered by as much as 150 px (Photoshop allows even more). AP seems to allow a max of 100 px though I may be mistaken. What settings should I use in the dialog box?

If you mean in the Refine Selection window, the Feather slider only goes to 100 px but you can enter larger numbers in the text field to its right. At least in my Mac version, the maximum accepted value is 1024 px.

[CarrotMan]

Many thanks for the answers and suggestions. I did try manually inputting my value greater than 100 into the box (Windows version) and I seemed to have a problem with the program hanging up, but it may just have been a coincidence. I’ll have another try later today, and also follow the videos.

[R C-R]

FWIW, I have very occasionally seen hangs or crashes in the Mac version when I enter some huge value in a slider field, particularly if it is a much larger pixel value than the size of my document. But I have not found a way to repeat that consistently, so I have never filed a bug report about it.