Seattle, Lake Union Fireworks, July 4, 2007

The Lighten blend mode in Photoshop is quite useful for night photography. By definition, the lighten blend mode looks at the color information in each channel and selects the base or blend color—whichever is lighter—as the result color. Pixels darker than the blend color are replaced, and pixels lighter than the blend color do not change.

This behavior allows the photographer to take multiple exposures of a subject and combine them without creating a blown out mess. One of the most common uses is blending multiple star trail exposures together so simulate a longer exposure in the sky but maintaining the correct exposure in the foreground.

Another example is combining multiple fireworks images in to one. The image above was made by combining six similarly exposed images using the Lighten blend mode. Each additional image layered on top using the Lighten blend mode effectively added the fireworks burst from the new layer but left everything else alone. The end result is a much greater concentration of fireworks bursts and properly exposed surroundings.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 9:32 am and is filed under Blog, Technique & Equipment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.