layers — Light Writing — Scott W Gonzalez

Good morning,

So a while back I went hiking with my daughters in Zion National Park, we completed the Canyon Overlook Trail. Impressive for a 5 and 7 year old. While looking over the Canyon I noticed the road and thought to myself “that would make a great night shot with car trails.” Since then I have seen pictures of it on photo sharing sites, and my first thought was “damnit I was going to do that.” In October I went camping and got a chance to take one myself. I feel that it turned out pretty decent.

It was a near full moon so the canyon was visible except where the shadow was.

So I went up there with my friend Drew. Sadly I forgot my remote so I was left with 30 second exposures with a self timer. Not exactly what I wanted but it worked. Around 40 pictures were taken and the cars were not cooperating. With the bright moon and about an hour of shooting the shadow of the mountain had moved from covering nearly half of the drive to covering about a quarter of it. So I chose the last shot to use as the background or base layer.

Then I added the other images onto it complete the light trail for the most part. Below are 4 of the images that I took.

So I cut and pasted each image onto the base layer and chose “lighten” in the blending option for each. I wanted the sky, canyon, and mountains to just be one image. Layer masks is the way to go to complete that task. In the “Layers” window there is a button that is a square with a circle in it called “Add Layer Mask.” Clicking it seems to do nothing except adding a white square next to the layer that you are on (It doesn’t work on the background layer). If we hit the “B” button then we can paint the layer and it will either hide of show what is beneath the layer we are working on. To toggle back and forth between hiding and revealing hit “X.” Alternatively if you want to see through most of the layer below hold “Alt” while clicking the Add layer mask button. You will have a box that is black next to the layer.

To sum up. I cut and pasted the pictures onto the background image, changed them to lighten, added layer masks, then painted the masks to keep the car trails that I wanted. Leading to this image below.

Photoshop is daunting with all of it’s options of what to do. I still only know maybe a quarter of what it can do. Layers and masks are a big part of what I use it for and from talking to other photographers it is a major thing to know and understand. I hope this helps you on your path to understanding photoshop.

~Scott

Good morning,

So I started writing a blog talking about how I made one of the more recent pictures that I posted and realized that the actions that it took had not been explained. Like layers. So I use photoshop and lightroom. They have become familiar and if you are a student or a teacher they have a discount on the software. I am not sure if it works with the subscription plan that they have now though.

So layers if you are not familiar are like putting a bunch of pieces of paper on top of each other. Depending on the paper it might not do all that much. If it is construction paper then you only see the top sheet, if it is tracing paper then you can see a few sheets down, if it is celluloid then the only part that you can’t see is the part that has writing or drawing on it. It depends on how you treat the layers in photoshop and if you use a mask (layer masks will be discussed at a later time).

Let’s start with a star trail stack. After taking the images using a sturdy tripod or mount go into photoshop, cut and paste the images on top of each other. This will make layers starting at 1 with a Background. You could also got to File>Automate>Photomerge and pick auto. I have not had much luck with it I have met people who have. The results are similar though.

These three images add up to about 14.5 minutes of exposure. I put the same settings on all of them when converting to jpeg then stacked them in photoshop. After you do that then you will only see the top layer. There is a drop down menu in the layers tab/window that should say “normal.” The trick here is to go to that drop down menu and pick “lighten” for everything except the background. The parts of the image that add light will show up through the layers.

Above is all three images stacked with the “lighten” setting then I went to Layer>Flatten Image which will put all the layers together into one that can be saved as a tiff or jpeg. Notice that the sky got brighter from the light pollution, being near a bright city doesn’t work well with astrophotography. This will work with other times when trying put together multiple images, car trails, I even heard that it will work with water to mimic a long exposure (I haven’t tried it though). So grab a sturdy mount, a remote, your camera then go out and shoot.

~Scott