Paint Shop Pro X1 Photo How to Mask. Advanced

To begin capturing extreme range of light in a landscape such as during the setting sun or when shooting the camera towards the sun, the shot needs to be pre-planned.

This won't work in a scene where there is a lot of movement. In this example I underexposed to show the waning light of the sunset in the background and re-shoot same landscape overexposed at 1/30 to capture a blurry skateboarder to convey movement in an otherwise static picture.

Tripod camera and take the same picture with different exposure times in order to capture sunset and the actions in the shadows to overcome digital camera light/dark problems. It's possible to get away from using a tripod if use your delayed shutter, but still must take care not to move the camera after placing securely on a flat surface braced by an object. A tripod is required for a sharp picture at long exposure times. The cheap priced plastic tripods locking levers are weak. A very good tripod is expensive. I bought and old style metal tripod at a thrift store, which is better than the department store plastic monopod I paid for new.

Image manipulation on the computer afterwards.

Feathering is easy. Drop out the overexposed sky and then take the foreground and layer it on top of the underexposed image but adjusting the selection for a more natural looking mask is time consuming.

In the embedded movie within this article, examples are shown of various feathering. Feather 12 means the feathering is at 12 pixels. Experience with the size of the image itself affects the feathering because pixel size is always the same. In other words, if the picture is relatively small, a pixel feather of 12 would look quite different than feather 12 of an image the size of 2592x1994. In the examples shown from the embedded movie, all the pictures are 2592x1994. Use the largest size image that your digital camera is able to do.