Blending Multiple Images Together Simulating Long Exposure?

[Troy at TheGTAMblog]

I have some images taken close together in time (one after the other) that I'd like to blend together, but where the differences between them are blended in such a way that the differences are seemingly 'time-stretched' between them [some type of averaging with transform it seems, but I am just guessing..]. Here is a video where the author gives an example of the affect done with PS:



I have been playing around with the Layers in PSPx8 but cannot seem to duplicate this effect in it (yet). Any ideas on how this is done in PSP?
[It is probably is a function that is built-in and I just haven't found it yet, heh]
If it is not possible, let me know and I'll add it to The Wishlist

Thanks!

[hartpaul]

Two ways
1. Save the images as Gifs and then use Animation Shop which came with earlier versions of the Jasc PSP.

2. Use specialist equipment to take and make a video
http://www.brightlife.com.au/store/time ... -2427.html

http://www.jaycar.com.au/weatherproof-t ... a/p/QC8030

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65wHnBn8Az0

You can also place the images into a video editor and make your movie there
Pinacle Studio series can do that .
Probably some free software ones as well. Windows Movie Maker.

[Troy at TheGTAMblog]

Two ways
1. Save the images as Gifs and then use Animation Shop which came with earlier versions of the Jasc PSP.

2. Use specialist equipment to take and make a video
http://www.brightlife.com.au/store/time ... -2427.html

http://www.jaycar.com.au/weatherproof-t ... a/p/QC8030

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65wHnBn8Az0

You can also place the images into a video editor and make your movie there
Pinacle Studio series can do that .
Probably some free software ones as well. Windows Movie Maker.

Thanks, I think I may have chosen the wrong term... What I meant was, is a blending of them together in a still image, with the differences 'blended' so they fade into each other, but leave the visual data from each one (although faded/stretched/etc). I think the term I was looking for was "Long Exposure", versus "Time Lapse".. (I'll have to change the Title of the thread). Sorry about that

Thank you for your input though, that was a great answer for my wrong term usage!

[flagpole]

in astro photography they call this stacking. and i think it's common to use specialist software. like http://deepskystacker.free.fr they are obviously trying to simulate long exposures because it's so dark.

is that what you're doing or are you trying to make say water look blurry?

it seems like you would add them as layers and then chose a blend mode that sort of averaged over all the layers. I can't think of a blend mode that does this though.

[Forriner]

In addition to what flagpole said, I wonder if PSP's Photo Blend (menu File/Photo Blend...) might be part of a solution.
I can't help with that because I've never used it, but in theory it might do the job.

[Troy at TheGTAMblog]

in astro photography they call this stacking. and i think it's common to use specialist software. like http://deepskystacker.free.fr they are obviously trying to simulate long exposures because it's so dark.

is that what you're doing or are you trying to make say water look blurry?

it seems like you would add them as layers and then chose a blend mode that sort of averaged over all the layers. I can't think of a blend mode that does this though.

Ah, thank you for your knowledgeable input... Yes, that's it. I have some traffic stills and want to "blend" then together so that their lights leave trails (if such a process is possible), as though they were taking as Long Exposure shots.

I tried all of the various blending modes of the Layers/options but nothing seemed to do it. There must be some algorithmic steps that PSP isn't taking, or I am using the wrong tool/options....

[photodrawken]

I have some traffic stills and want to "blend" then together so that their lights leave trails (if such a process is possible), as though they were taking as Long Exposure shots.

No, that's not possible.

What you get out is what you put in -- if your individual images show the lights as points, then no matter what program you use and no matter how you blend the images, you will get an image with a combination of individual points of light.

You can try working on your last image and using various "smear" and distortion brushes on the points of light, but the result will never match the result of taking a long exposure shot.

P.S., I do not have <expletive deleted> Flash installed, and will never install it, so I am unable to see the example you posted. Therefore, I apologize if I am misunderstanding what you're trying to do.

[hartpaul]

Your video does not actually show what you are apparently wanting. The cloud actually moves positions and does not leave an aftertrail.
As mentioned this can be done using a video editor to place the various images together.
You also mentioned the example of traffic stills which inclide the lights of cars and making it look as if you are getting car trails.

You could from one image:
1. Duplicate it say 4 times
2. Turn off visibility of the top 4 layers
3. Apply motion blur - Adjust > Blur > Motion Blur and select the directio of blur and increase the strength to get the amount of blur you want.
4. Make layer 2 active (counting up from bottom) , reduce its opacity to about 40
5. Use move tool to move the layer 2 image in the direction of the blur til it aligns with the last part of the blur from layer 1
6. Increase opacity to max. Apply motion blur.
7. Repeat this procedure with each of the other layers.
8, Change the blend mode of each of the layers except the first one to Screen.
This


will give an extended blur .


Roughly done.
Of course the easiest way is to set your camera up on a tripod at night and use a long exposure.

[JoeB]

Thanks, I think I may have chosen the wrong term... What I meant was, is a blending of them together in a still image, with the differences 'blended' so they fade into each other, but leave the visual data from each one (although faded/stretched/etc). I think the term I was looking for was "Long Exposure", versus "Time Lapse".. (I'll have to change the Title of the thread).

I suspect you chose the wrong term because the person who presented that video tutorial used the wrong term, so his mistake, not yours.

As others have pointed out, the end result of the video tutorial project is more a stacking/blending procedure. If it was actually a long exposure result the whole image would have been much lighter and over-exposed than the original images were. That's because the longer the exposure, the more light is allowed through the lens, and the more light the lighter/brighter the image becomes.

Having seen your post about wanting to do light trails, I am assuming that these are images taken at night. In those type of situations the lights from moving cars are many times brighter than the vehicles from which the lights are emitted, and those vehicles are travelling at speed. So those situations lend themselves to longer exposures because while a single shot would show the vehicles as basically black (or almost black) blobs, a somewhat extended exposure can properly expose for the light trails and not over expose the vehicles or most of the rest of the dark areas of the scene. And you'll notice from images done at night for night trails that the light trails nearest the vehicles are brighter than those at the end of the triails, where they fade into the dark.

As for trying to do that kind of light trial with stacking/blending, someone else has already pointed out why that won't work.

[flagpole]

as has been said. the photos are never going to have the streams of light that you're looking for because they are always going to be made up of points unless you have literally 100s or 1000s.

A couple of things did occur to me though. if you were working with a few images it would be relatively easy to set the bottom one to 100% opacity, the next to 50%, then 33%, 25%, 20% 17%, 14%... (1/n)

another idea i had was that if you stack them with blend mode 'lighter' it will pick the layer where it's lightest and since you are after the lights then it might pick out all the lights for you.

It's such an obvious thing that there must be a way to find the average of all the layers?

[Troy at TheGTAMblog]

Thanks, I think I may have chosen the wrong term... What I meant was, is a blending of them together in a still image, with the differences 'blended' so they fade into each other, but leave the visual data from each one (although faded/stretched/etc). I think the term I was looking for was "Long Exposure", versus "Time Lapse".. (I'll have to change the Title of the thread).

I suspect you chose the wrong term because the person who presented that video tutorial used the wrong term, so his mistake, not yours.

As others have pointed out, the end result of the video tutorial project is more a stacking/blending procedure. If it was actually a long exposure result the whole image would have been much lighter and over-exposed than the original images were. That's because the longer the exposure, the more light is allowed through the lens, and the more light the lighter/brighter the image becomes.

Having seen your post about wanting to do light trails, I am assuming that these are images taken at night. In those type of situations the lights from moving cars are many times brighter than the vehicles from which the lights are emitted, and those vehicles are travelling at speed. So those situations lend themselves to longer exposures because while a single shot would show the vehicles as basically black (or almost black) blobs, a somewhat extended exposure can properly expose for the light trails and not over expose the vehicles or most of the rest of the dark areas of the scene. And you'll notice from images done at night for night trails that the light trails nearest the vehicles are brighter than those at the end of the triails, where they fade into the dark.

As for trying to do that kind of light trial with stacking/blending, someone else has already pointed out why that won't work.

Thank you, I was confused as to the term that should be used...

I have some traffic stills and want to "blend" then together so that their lights leave trails (if such a process is possible), as though they were taking as Long Exposure shots.

No, that's not possible.

What you get out is what you put in -- if your individual images show the lights as points, then no matter what program you use and no matter how you blend the images, you will get an image with a combination of individual points of light.

You can try working on your last image and using various "smear" and distortion brushes on the points of light, but the result will never match the result of taking a long exposure shot.

Thank you for your explanation and input!

Your video does not actually show what you are apparently wanting. The cloud actually moves positions and does not leave an aftertrail.
As mentioned this can be done using a video editor to place the various images together.
You also mentioned the example of traffic stills which inclide the lights of cars and making it look as if you are getting car trails.

You could from one image:
1. Duplicate it say 4 times
2. Turn off visibility of the top 4 layers
3. Apply motion blur - Adjust > Blur > Motion Blur and select the directio of blur and increase the strength to get the amount of blur you want.
4. Make layer 2 active (counting up from bottom) , reduce its opacity to about 40
5. Use move tool to move the layer 2 image in the direction of the blur til it aligns with the last part of the blur from layer 1
6. Increase opacity to max. Apply motion blur.
7. Repeat this procedure with each of the other layers.
8, Change the blend mode of each of the layers except the first one to Screen.
This will give an extended blur .

Sounds fantastic - I'll have to try this!

as has been said. the photos are never going to have the streams of light that you're looking for because they are always going to be made up of points unless you have literally 100s or 1000s.

A couple of things did occur to me though. if you were working with a few images it would be relatively easy to set the bottom one to 100% opacity, the next to 50%, then 33%, 25%, 20% 17%, 14%... (1/n)

another idea i had was that if you stack them with blend mode 'lighter' it will pick the layer where it's lightest and since you are after the lights then it might pick out all the lights for you.

It's such an obvious thing that there must be a way to find the average of all the layers?

That's what I was wondering.... I am going to try a combination of hartpaul's and your idea, I may have to Erase and play with it a bit, but I wonder if that would do it - and I thought for sure there must be some automated way to just "average" the images out - interesting....



Thank you all for your valuable input I look forward to trying these steps when I can.

[flagpole]

i don't suppose you feel like throwing us the images? see what we can come up with?

[Forriner]

I may be really off, but I tried something in PSP's menu File/Photo Blend...

Don't mind the subject, it's the idea behind it. Camera on a tripod, I took 5 photos of a glass ash tray traveling across the static scene. You see 4 of those on the top of the attachment. The bottom photo is blended in PSP, auto-aligned, auto-brush, include moving objects checked. Then processed and saved. The result is a moving ash tray.
Note that in the Blend dialogue, you can paint green parts that you definitely don't want to lose, and red for parts that you would like to disappear in the final result. After processing it opens a dialogue like the PSP Adjust tab, but I just saved this Blend after processing.

In the film above, the author takes several photos, each with a 30 second exposure. That's why there's cloud movement, but also leaf and branch movement (blur) in the trees. So each photo has 30 seconds of movement. By blending 5 in Photoshop he gets a total of 2.5 minutes of movement. That isn't a simulation of long exposure, that's just combining long exposures. On each photo a cloud moves 30 seconds, and the resulting blend looks 5 times as big, just the movement.


If this isn't anywhere near what you meant, just ignore this post

[Troy at TheGTAMblog]

i don't suppose you feel like throwing us the images? see what we can come up with?

Sure! You sound like me, I would want to get some samples and play with them on my spare time for fun

(Resized down for the Forum/Restrictions/etc)

Here are three shots I found (they aren't the ones I would use, I have over 50,000 to go through sometime (I'm good at collecting, not so good at organizing)) - so they aren't the greatest quality, sorry - but the idea was something like these, where say, the traffic along the bottom, with the red lights; I was hoping to make them 'trails' so that it seemed as though it was one Long Exposure shot (stretched, etc) if such a thing can be done.... I'll play more with it when I have time, too. Have fun with it and thanks!

[Troy at TheGTAMblog]

I may be really off, but I tried something in PSP's menu File/Photo Blend...

Don't mind the subject, it's the idea behind it. Camera on a tripod, I took 5 photos of a glass ash tray traveling across the static scene. You see 4 of those on the top of the attachment. The bottom photo is blended in PSP, auto-aligned, auto-brush, include moving objects checked. Then processed and saved. The result is a moving ash tray.
Note that in the Blend dialogue, you can paint green parts that you definitely don't want to lose, and red for parts that you would like to disappear in the final result. After processing it opens a dialogue like the PSP Adjust tab, but I just saved this Blend after processing.

In the film above, the author takes several photos, each with a 30 second exposure. That's why there's cloud movement, but also leaf and branch movement (blur) in the trees. So each photo has 30 seconds of movement. By blending 5 in Photoshop he gets a total of 2.5 minutes of movement. That isn't a simulation of long exposure, that's just combining long exposures. On each photo a cloud moves 30 seconds, and the resulting blend looks 5 times as big, just the movement.

If this isn't anywhere near what you meant, just ignore this post

That's it! Almost, heh. It looks great and is exactly the concept of them 'blended together' I was looking for (some parts not blended, just as you figured out) - now if only there were a way to make them 'stretch' into each other (like lights from traffic looks like lines of light in a Long Exposure shot..).
Great find though, PHOTO BLEND, this is great! I'll have fun playing with that one

I think the 'blended' effect might be able to be emulated via hartpaul's 'blurring' idea (Motion Blur), I'll have to play with it a bit and see what I can do with it...

Thanks again