pecohen Loc: Central Maine

Yesterday I hiked an unfamiliar trail, taking my camera but no tripod. Holding the camera absolutely still was out of the question. Instead I took a burst of (what turned out to be 38) closely spaced exposures, each much like the first image. The first step is to align them as layers in PS. There are several possibilities for blurring the water to get something similar to a long exposure:

1. Just blend them using the "lighten" blending mode.
2. Take the median pixel values
3. Take the maximum pixel values
The results for these options are shown in the next three images.

But having done this, the four resulting images can be blended as well. There are many, many possibilities for this, but the fifth image shows one possibility. And of course that resulting blend can be edited as well, giving me the last of the images.

What I'm wondering is whether others at UHH have tried this kind of approach. Are there better ways to approach this or perhaps other blending modes that work well?

Sample image from camera


Lighten blend


Median Blend


Maximum Blend


Blend of Blends


Blend of Blends + Touch-up

(Download)

UTMike Loc: South Jordan, UT

Thanks for sharing!

R.G. Loc: Scotland

All of the blended images have a grainy look. Was average blending a possibility? It may give smoother results.

pecohen Loc: Central Maine

Sure, that was another possibility I probably should have included. I was a bit bothered by that grainy look in the water as well and in the last image I applied pretty strong noise reduction as a way to fight it. Thanks for the suggestion.

Wasabi

Interesting.

pecohen Loc: Central Maine

The attached image shows the mean values. It does appear smoother and it probably is but to some degree appears smoother because it is a darker image and the specks are most noticeable in lighter areas.. Averaging will darken the specs even more since those droplets land on the same pixels only rarely. .

The grainy appearance is due to drops of water that are thrown up into the air. In a long exposure they would no doubt appear as streaks of light showing the trajectory of the drops. I'm giving myself some time now to think about ways to process the specs away, but it seems they are quite different in origin than noise. I'll post again here if I come up with anything useful.

R.G. Loc: Scotland

It seems to have done the same with any specks of foam that were on the move. Maybe a loss of whiteness is inevitable. Maybe if you'd used a slower shutter speed there would have been a small amount of motion blur in each exposure. Auto align would have taken care of any gradual movement of the camera between shots.

But it looks like averaging has got you closer to something that you can process effectively. Maybe selecting the water and going a little bit left with the sharpen slider (and maybe the Clarity slider) plus some denoise followed by some brightening of the highlights (or overall brightening) might work.

R.G. Loc: Scotland

Perhaps the problem is due to the fact that the scene was bright enough to produce lots of specular highlights which are brighter than the splashes and ripples would have been without the direct sunlight. Well lit splashes can be tricky enough even without the addition of specular reflections.

josquin1 Loc: Massachusetts

Original from the camera is the best for me. The others look like they were sprinkled with salt.

Bultaco Loc: Aiken, SC

Nr1 hands down.