Focal Length Blending Photoshop Tutorial

Landscape Photography  •  Photo Editing  •  Photography Tips  •  Photoshop Tutorials

Many landscape photographers take a long time to realize this, but foregrounds are an integral part of any successful image. Foregrounds set the context and draw viewers’ eyes into the image.

But don’t worry if you don’t have a powerful foreground in your image; you can always create one by using a technique called “focal length blending” or “perspective blending”. Landscape photographer and media designer Christian Möhrle shows you how it’s done:

Mohrle starts off by showing how you can use different global and local adjustments to retouch your image. It is always a good idea to make those adjustments prior to making any compositional changes.

Next, he shows how easily you can take two separate images of the same scene, taken at different focal lengths, and create a composite with a stronger foreground element. The trick is to clone the foreground from the image where the foreground is more prominent and interesting, and then stamp it over the target image.

He also shows you how you can fine-tune the overlay using pixel grids, the layer-transparency tool and layer masks, so the blend is seamless.

“The benefit of this method is you can nicely fill the foreground.”

As a bonus, toward the end of the video, Möhrle demonstrates how he cleans the image up for a more refined look. Furthermore, you can also see how he makes the flowers in the foreground fill the frame using the perspective-warp tool in Photoshop.

This is a great and a simple trick that you can use to take your images to the net level. If you have an image that you love so much but it’s weak on the foreground, give this trick a shot.