more masking

Hi!

Have you tried making a mask from one of the channels? I used the green channel in the example below because it had the most contrast (it usually does) and then made a copy of it to create an Alpha Channel.

I then opened the Curves panel and changed the curve to what you see below. Then when you click ok and go back to the Layers panel, you can load that Green copy Alpha Channel as a mask. You will get better results with a clearer image, but you can play around with Curves to get the mask that you want. Remember, where Black is, it hides and protects that part of the image. White will reveal the areas that you want to change. And any gray values you have in the image will give you that level of masking or revealing.

Let us know if that helps!

Michelle

Addition to original inquiry titled: Masking question

The images you provided here are really too small to assess and work with but this test shows promise.

The image on the left was created using the ground image as both the bottom layer of the two layer stack and as a mask for the darker sky layer (top layer) as I described in a previous post. Masking question

This time I added sharpening (Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp mask  with Amount set to 100% and a Radius of 4.6) for greater definition of the trees. That sharpness is applied in both the bottom layer and the mask. Note that the trees are no longer a blob. You may experiment with greater sharpness but, as you can see, the  sharpening done for the sample above cannot compensate completely for the inherent softness in the original image.

The second image shows the effect of increasing the contrast of the mask in the event that result is closer to what you have in mind in a large scale version.   If you plan to reshoot this project in the future it would be prudent to consider a rock-solid tripod, a low humidity night with as little breeze as possible in order to obtain maximum sharpness of the trees at that distance.  Good luck.

The real issue is these images will not seamlessly blend using a mask because the sky image is way darker than the darkest areas in the foreground image.   I'd suggest getting those closer first, then masking them.