The Way of the Digital Photographer: Walking the Photoshop post-production path to more creative photography

Working with layer masks

I was walking around an industrial neighborhood in West Oakland, California, when I came across a fenced-in lot filled with giant pipes and an ancient-looking rusty crane.

I found a large man-sized hole in the fence, so I walked in and started to explore. I liked looking through the pipes to view the graffiti and got to thinking about the image I wanted to create. I realized that I needed to underexpose to capture the vibrant colors of the graffiti, while at the same time I wanted to see the contours of the pipes. How did I solve this exposure challenge?

The point of using aligned layers in a layer stack becomes apparent ...