SOME PHOTOSHOP INSPIRATION (CONT.......)

You can achieve this effect “in-camera” if your camera has a multiple exposure mode, but this article discusses doing the blending in Photoshop.

One advantage of this technique (as with any multiple exposures) is that the processing loses a lot of the precise detail and sharpness of the image, so you don’t need pristine images. You don’t even need to use a camera, both of the examples I’m showing here were taken using my iPhone.

When taking the photos do your best to position your subject (eg the tree trunk) in the same place in each photo, but you will obviously be able to align them in Photoshop later too.

The easiest way to load multiple files into layers in Photoshop is to use the File / Scripts / Load Files into Stack command (see Figure 5). Use the browse button to find your files and check the “Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images” checkbox if you want Photoshop to try to align the images. You may need to manually adjust the alignment of some of the layers using the Move tool as sometimes the layers are quite different for “In the Round” sets of images and Photoshop does not always do a perfect job.

Now that you have your images as layers in your Photoshop file you want to blend them together, and there are many different options. Many of the layer blend modes could be used, such as Lighten, Darken, Multiply, Screen, Overlay or Soft Light but the best starting place I have found just leaves them all at Normal blend mode and uses the layer opacity to blend them in.

Let’s call it the “Inverse Layer Opacity” method. The opacity of the bottom layer should already be set to 100%, then as you count up from the bottom layer set the layer opacity to the inverse of the layer number, so the second layer is set to 50% (1 divided by 2), the third layer is set to 33% (1 divided by 3), the fourth layer is set to 25% (1 divided by 4), the fifth layer is set to 20% (1 divided by 5) all the way up to the twentieth layer (in my example) which is set to 5% (1 divided by 20).