About a week ago I posted this image on Facebook, along with a link to my web site, where my clients along with their friends & family could view some of their wedding images.  Emails poured in from photographers asking how this capture was made and enhanced.  In this post I am going to share the extraordinary technique, that when coupled with an exceptional software product, enables you to EASILY create dramatic images involving intricate masking.

I captured this image on my Nikon D3 camera equipped with an AF-S Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8G ED lens.  My assistant was positioned behind the couple with a radio fired Nikon SB 900 Speedlight.  Looking at the before and after versions of this image side-by-side will help you visualize just how exacting the masking had to be in order to achieve the final result.  Simply burning down the sky in Photoshop was not an option.  To do so would have taken all the detail out of the tops of the trees that lined the path and put them totally into silhouette.  I wanted to hold all of the detail in those trees while allowing a magnificent sunset to show through all the openings around the individual leaves.

The first step in creating this image was to darken the sky in Photoshop to create the breathtaking sunset.  Simply making a levels adjustment of the RGB channels (Image>Adjustments>Levels) and lowering the mid range slider yielded this image.  The sky is amazing…the rest of the image is useless.  Save this image under a different file name.  It will look something like this:

Now comes the fun part which has been made ever so easy by the folks at Vertustech and their unbelievable software offering “Fluid Mask 3“.  I first met Mornee and the crew from Vertus at WPPI in 2008.  Fluid Mask Version 2 was being shown at the trade show and was thrilling everyone that witnessed their incredible demos.  I purchased this software on the spot.  As good as it was then, Version 3 blows it away.  I encourage you to visit the Vertustech web site, download a trial version of the software and experiment with a few images.  There are extensive video tutorials on their web site showing how to use this product.  I’m going to give you a short description of the steps involved but I’ll refer any specific questions on use back to the good folks at Vertus.

Open your original image in Photoshop and choose the Fluid Mask 3 filter from your filter menu (Filter>Vertus>Fluid Mask 3).  Your Photoshop window will close to conserve RAM and a dedicated Fluid Mask workspace will open.  You will not believe how easy and automatic this software works.  Choose the local delete brush and paint a swatch across the sky and Fluid Mask intuitively chooses the areas of the sky that you wish to mask out.  Any small spots it misses can be selected by clicking on those areas with smaller sized local delete brush.  The image now looks something like this:

Next you will Autofill the areas of the image that you wish to keep by choosing Image>Auto-Fill with Keep.  Your workspace will now look something like this:

You must now fine tune your selection mask by using the Blend Exact brush.  Your workspace will now look something like this:

Finally, you’ll tweak the most exacting selection masking choices using the patch tool:

When you are happy with your selection mask click to create your cutout and Fluid Mask generates the most precise automatic mask you’ve ever seen.  This one looked like this:

Copy this cutout to your clipboard, reopen the image you created with the deep sunset and paste the cutout on top of it.  Voila!  An amazing composite with awesome detail in the shadows and a saturated deep rich sunset.

The entire process took me about five or six minutes and I don’t use this software very often.  The pros at Vertus could probably have effected this composite in under two minutes.  With practice you and I could too.

Detailed tutorials on the use of this software product are available on Vertus’ web site.  Any technical questions should be directed to the folks at Vertus.  Give this great product a try and check out the galleries on the Vertus web site to see how other creative imaging professionals are using this product to handle challenging masking projects.