photo merging long exposure

[darrenskinner1 Profile]

i need help,

I recently took the same photo of water around 20 times, im looking to merge them all into one so the water and clouds looks smooth, im not sure how to do this on smart photo, its easy at nights as I just lower the iso and take a longer exposure but id like to day time shots also,

its the same as star trails, is this something you can do here?

[admin]

You can by doing the following (this assumes your camera was on a tripod, otherwise you'll need to align the photos using the Move,Rotate and Scale mode).

1. Load the first image.
2. Go into the composite tool.
3. Load the Nth picture as an overlay (starting at 2nd, then 3rd etc)
4. The important bit: Set the opacity of the new overlay to 100 / N, i.e. 50%, 33%, 25%, 20%, etc.
5. Go to step 3

You'll find with each addition, your photo gets smoother. You may not need all 20. Interestingly this might not be enough to remove all noise, as there is some intrinsic to the camera, so you might need to find a de-noise effect in the gallery to help. N.B. The denoise effects can be slow to save.

Tony

[darrenskinner1 Profile]

ive only taken 11 photos was going to use it as a trial hope this will be enough

yeh I used my tripod and remote

whats do you mean by Nth photo?

im finding this interesting but difficult

[admin]

Sorry, I was using maths terms! Nth is a short way of saying 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. So, load the 1st photo from the file menu. Then load the 2nd photo as an overlay, and set the opacity to 50%. Load the 3rd photo as an overlay and set the opacity to 30%. Load the 4th photo as an overlay and set the opacity to 25%, and so on. Hopefully your picture gets nicer with each addition. If you find it gets softer, that means your tripod wasn't quite steady, or there's movement in the scene (like trees blowing etc).

Tony