After shooting a time-lapse of the sun rising over St. Ives a couple of days ago, I realised that I had an opportunity to experiment with a new blending mode. This blending mode is called 'lighten' and as you may expect from the name, it takes the lightest parts of one image and overlays it onto the other. I'll take you through how I made the image you can see above.
The two images that I chose to use were; one as the sun rose (to get the most colour in the sky) and one whilst the sun had not risen (meaning that all of the street and house lights were on). Usually when editing two images to be blended together I concentrate one image on the sky and the other on the foreground. However this time, the second image was only being used for the lights and so for that one I pushed the highlights to +100 and bought the shadows up a little. The image taken at sunrise was edited as though it was just the one exposure that was going to be the final image. The two starting images can be seen below:
The two images that I chose to use were; one as the sun rose (to get the most colour in the sky) and one whilst the sun had not risen (meaning that all of the street and house lights were on). Usually when editing two images to be blended together I concentrate one image on the sky and the other on the foreground. However this time, the second image was only being used for the lights and so for that one I pushed the highlights to +100 and bought the shadows up a little. The image taken at sunrise was edited as though it was just the one exposure that was going to be the final image. The two starting images can be seen below:
The next stage is to layer the two files. I did this by selecting the whole canvas (ctrl-A) of the darker image (bottom right) and copying then pasting it onto the other file. You will now have a second layer on the first image, click on this layer in the layer panel and then change the blending mode to 'lighten' (shown below):
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Photoshop will now take all the parts of 'layer 1' that are lighter than the background layer and place them on top. When I did this with these files, other parts other than the lights shone through (as you can see below) and so I had to do some clearing up.
To do this, I made a layer mask and used a black brush at 100% opacity (located at the top of photoshop frame), a hardness of 80% (found by right clicking anywhere on the image) and painted in all of the area that I didn't want - leaving just the lights of the houses and the sea front.
With some final tweaks, the image was complete and this was the first time that I had successfully used a blending mode, so I thought I would make a post as I previously promised I would!
I thought that I would post a timelapse of me editing this image, I still haven't managed to get the cursor to show up in the video, but it could still help you to get an idea of my workflow (and see the edit for the two images seperately).
With some final tweaks, the image was complete and this was the first time that I had successfully used a blending mode, so I thought I would make a post as I previously promised I would!
I thought that I would post a timelapse of me editing this image, I still haven't managed to get the cursor to show up in the video, but it could still help you to get an idea of my workflow (and see the edit for the two images seperately).
Thanks for any likes, shares and comments!
