I shoot a lot of product and graphic work, but every once in a while a client wants “something editorial, something outdoorsy.” Which is how I ended up last spring with two decent landscape shots from the same scene and the same problem I always have: the sky is perfectly exposed, the foreground looks like it was photographed inside a cave, or I nail the foreground and the sky turns into a white, blown-out disaster. Pick your poison.

I’d been handling this the lazy way, sliding the Highlights and Shadows sliders in Lightroom until I got something “good enough.” It worked fine until the scenes had serious dynamic range. Then it just… didn’t. That’s when I went digging and landed on this William Patino tutorial, which finally got me doing exposure blending properly in Photoshop instead of limping along with single-file adjustments.

Why Lightroom-Only Editing Has a Ceiling

Lightroom is great at global adjustments. You can recover a surprising amount of detail from a raw file. But recovering detail and actually blending two well-exposed files are different things. When you have a shot where the foreground requires a completely different exposure than the sky, you’re asking one file to carry too much weight. Layer masking in Photoshop lets you take two exposures, one for the sky and one for the land, and stitch them together so naturally that nobody can tell you cheated. Which, frankly, is the whole game.

Setting Up Your Two Exposures as Layers

Patino starts with two raw files of the same scene shot from a tripod. That last part matters. If the camera moved between shots, your layers won’t line up, and you’ll be fighting misalignment instead of masking. He brings both files into Photoshop as separate layers, with the darker (better-sky) exposure on top and the brighter (better-foreground) exposure on the bottom.

Once they’re stacked, he uses Edit > Auto-Align Layers just to be safe, even with tripod shots. This is a habit worth building. It takes about ten seconds and saves you from subtle ghosting later.

The layer order matters here. You’re going to mask the top layer to reveal the bottom layer’s foreground. Think of it as cutting a window into your top layer to let the good foreground light through.

The Layer Mask: Where the Magic Actually Happens

With the darker top layer selected, Patino adds a layer mask using the mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. The mask starts white, which means the entire top layer is visible. The goal is to paint black over the foreground area of that mask, hiding the dark foreground from the top layer and revealing the brighter version underneath.

He uses a large, soft brush (hardness at or near zero) set to black, and paints over the foreground. The horizon line is where this gets fiddly. A hard edge there looks fake immediately. Patino works at a low brush opacity, somewhere around 30 to 50 percent, and builds up the transition gradually rather than committing to a single full-opacity stroke. This is the part that takes patience but makes the result look real.

One thing he emphasizes: zoom into the horizon to check for halos or hard lines. If you see a thin bright or dark strip along the transition, you haven’t blended softly enough. Go back in with an even lower opacity and feather it out.

Checking Your Work with the Mask Overlay

A trick Patino shows that I hadn’t been using consistently: hold Alt (Option on Mac) and click the layer mask thumbnail in the Layers panel. This switches your canvas view to show just the mask itself, displayed as a black-and-white image. White areas are where the top layer shows. Black areas are where it’s hidden. Gray areas are the semi-transparent transition zones.

Looking at your mask in isolation is the fastest way to catch problem spots. Rough edges, weird shapes, accidental black patches in the sky. Fix them here, in the mask view, before you flatten anything. It’s much cleaner than trying to diagnose issues from the composite view alone.

Where I’d Push This Further (and Where It Falls Apart)

For most landscape shots, this two-exposure approach is exactly right. But I’ve run into scenes where even two exposures aren’t enough, particularly anything involving a very bright sunset behind dark foreground elements with detail in the shadows. In those cases, I’ll bring in a third exposure and stack a second masked layer. The process is identical: add the new layer on top, mask it, blend it in. You can technically stack as many as you need, though after three you’re usually dealing with a creative problem more than a technical one.

Where this technique genuinely struggles is with moving subjects. If there are trees in the wind or water with wave motion between your shots, the two exposures won’t match up perfectly even with Auto-Align. You’ll get ghosting along the edges of anything that moved. In that situation, you can mask around the problem area and handle it separately, maybe with a luminosity mask or a targeted adjustment layer, but it gets complicated fast. Patino’s tutorial is best suited to scenes where everything was still between shots.

The single most important thing I took from this tutorial: the quality of the blend lives entirely in how you handle that horizon transition, and the only way to do it well is with a low-opacity soft brush built up in passes, not one heavy stroke.

Watch the full video from William Patino to see the brush settings and mask work demonstrated visually. Some things are genuinely easier to learn by watching than by reading, and this is one of them.