This lesson is our first foray into what could be called into "advanced photo-processing techniques." Layering and masking can give you extremely fine control over what happens in different areas of the photo, but in order to use them and not get caught, it's important to have an understanding of what's going on.

There are many purposes for using masks, for example, for creating panoramas, manipulating photos (adding or removing stuff), or doing purely artistic stuff. I most often end up using them to manage contrast between different areas of the picture. For example, I might have a sky that's too bright or a ground that's too dark, and I'll want to darken the one and brighten the other, for a more pleasing or more perceptually accurate overall look to the picture. This is what we'll do here. We'll take one picture with this problem, and use layers and masks to address it. However, the selecting, layering and masking techniques are completely general: you can use them for any purpose where you need to combine things from different pictures or make changes to different areas in the picture.

First we'll take the picture, make a mask for the ground I want to lighten, and lighten it. Then we'll use an even fancier technique: we'll take another frame (the same scene but exposed for the foreground, with a slightly shifted focus point, too), and replace the lightened foreground layer with the second frame. Since I shot the frames hand-held, we'll need to nudge it into alignment first. We will use the same mask we created for the first purpose.

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