Joining two differently focused photos to make an image. Lighthouse, Isle of Portland

[Somersetscott]

Hi, I may have processed this in a 'bottom backwards' way - So I was in the Isle of Portland in Dorset and found myself stood on a sand dune positioning to hide the people walking and sitting around the bottom of the light house. This caused an issue where by I could either focus on the dune and nice flowers but miss the detail on the lighthouse or focus on the lighthouse and miss the foreground detail, so I took two shots below:

Details:
D7000
Nikon 35mm 1.8g DX
Manual
Exposure time 1/640
@ F10
ISO 500
Auto WB#

Tripod used!

I then set about joining these two - I used the freeware Paint.net, layered them ontop of eachother and lasso tooled and deleted the section on the top layer that was out of focus and deleted it carefully and saved, result:



Then imported to lightroom 4 to adjust the temperature, shadows, whites, blacks, sharpen, add gradient etc etc. and ended up with this:



What do you guys think of the image?
Also is there a clear fault in my workflow/an easier way of doing this?

Please be honest, Many thanks!
Scott

 

[Nikon Photographer]

The foreground on your final shot looks good, but the lighthouse and the sky just looks unreal, as you were using a tripod I can't understand why you were using such a high ISO, and a high shutter speed, slow down the shutter speed and you you would have been able to stop down the lens a bit, and focusing half way into the image, you would have got the lighthouse and the foreground both in focus saving you a lot of work on the post processing.

 

[Don Kuykendall_RIP]

That is called focus stacking. That is something you can do in photoshop.

 

[Rexer John]

Agreed with Nikon photographer.

Is the image clipped to show us a section of the final image or is it the image you're using?

The photo is in two halves (top and bottom), each are competing with no clear winner. is it a photo of a lighthouse with foreground interest or a landscape with a lighthouse.
The lighthouse then cuts the vertical in a way that doesn't do the scene any favours.

The lighthouse is leaning, I recommend using the focus points in the viewfinder as a guide to get things straight before adjusting for composition.

Use focus to your advantage, lead the viewer to what you see as the area of interest in a photo.
If you want blanket focus in an image, get a point and shoot with a tiny sensor.
I really don't get why you would want to have a flat looking image.

 

[Somersetscott]

Thanks guys, this is the kind of critique I was hoping for - seeing exactly what I wasn't and giving some constructive pointers for improvement.

I was on a high ISO as I didn't reset it after shooting some birds earlier that day - I should have thought about that and checked. Good to know that if I had bothered I would have got more in focus.

Focus stacking - Thanks, new term to me. I only purchased Lightroom 4 last week and learning via youtube videos how to use it - playing with all these new-to-me features and wanting-to-fiddle is resulting in my un-natural looking images, I didn't help myself by doing it on a laptop, I can see on my desktop now it really does look unnatural. Trial, error and plenty of practice should sort it. I was using CS2 until I realised the version I had was meant to be only for people that have bought it in the past and it does not run on my Windows 7 Home edition without some kind of emulator.

Flat Image, yes! looking back it is! plus the wierd colour of the lighthouse. I'm glad my experiment is kind of successful in that I managed to 'focus stack', but it certainly is lacking a point of interest and therefore didn't require this technique.

Thanks for the replies! i'll certainly take them onboard and hopefully improve