Playin Around

       Well, recently I bit the bullet and joined the cloud, I subscribed to Photoshop CC. I use Lightroom to process my images and find that it is all I need for the vast majority of my editing. But there are some instances where I have wanted more options. Exposure blending was my main reason for purchasing Photoshop. Many times in landscape photography it is difficult to correctly expose an image with one shot. The camera tries to find a middle ground and the result may mean an overexposed sky or underexposed foreground. Bracketing your exposures and running them through an HDR program can help, but sometimes the results are not realistic. But with Photoshop, I can take a correctly exposed sky and blend it with a correctly exposed foreground and have a realistic result. I also wanted the ability to focus stack and blend these images together in Photoshop to have a photograph with great depth of field and sharpness. These techniques are not possible in Lightroom. Well........I have gotten sidetracked.
      I plan on using these techniques in my landscape photographs in the near future but in my quest in attempting to understand how to use these techniques, I have come across some neat tutorials. And the results are really cool in my opinion! Below, are two images I created just playing around with my own photographs in Photoshop. I took a photo of the grill of a semi truck, removed the sky and replaced it with a different sky containing lightning. I did the same with the picture of the abandoned house. I then added some filters in Photoshop to simulate rain. I really like the moody, graphic, illustrative look of the images. Kind of interesting how I wanted to use Photoshop to help make some of my photographs more realistic and I ended up creating pictures that are far from real. Thats what happens when your just playin around.