OK so without turning this into a complete photo editing tutorial I’ll just briefly go over the steps I took to create a clean image when I couldn’t be out of frame. Each image is an HDR using 9 brackets captured with DFE and merged in AuroraHDR using the same settings. That’s important because the 2 images MUST be identical except for my position. I ended up needing to do this 4 times on my latest gig.
-
Image 1 (top layer):
-
Image 2 (bottom layer):
-
After importing the images as aligned layers, I simply created a white (reveal) mask on the top layer and, with the mask selected, used a soft black brush over my body to mask myself out of the image.
The mask looks like this:
It hides the black areas of the masked image causing the top image to have a hole in it:
Then when both layers are active, and after some other editing to remove shadows, the resulting image is clean:
I hope that helps someone with a tricky shot, and that just scratches the surface of whats possible with masking.