![]() ![]() Images with long star trails require very long exposures, however the ambient light of a scene is often intense enough to limit the exposure to something much shorter. ![]() Blend a series of images for night photography image stacking in order to create an image with a longer exposure than is possible with a single frame. Blend a series of images where the focus point is difference in order to create an image with a greater depth of field - this is a common approach when creating a macro image. With LR/Enfuse you can: Blend images of different exposures together in order to create a natural looking image with a greater dynamic range. His latest forays into the world of current technology have been shooting more and more video and creating an iPad app called Photique where he publishes articles and interactive eGuides as well as free image portfolios.LR/Enfuse is a Lightroom plugin that allows you to blend multiple exposures together directly from within Lightroom by using the open source Enfuse application. Nick Rains has been a professional photographer for almost thirty years, doing mostly editorial work for clients such as Australian Geographic and has made a point of keeping up to date with technology. Setting it up in the first place might take a bit of thought and effort but, believe me, it’s well worth it. In the meantime, automating your workflow like this can save you a huge amount of time. I intend to go through this process in greater detail in a Lightroom eBook I am currently working on. One refinement would be not to do much adjustment in LR before blending, set LR/Enfuse to create 16bit TIFFs and then use LR’s extensive tone mapping tools to adjust the new output file to suit your tastes. This is only a quick run through the method, it’s not completely foolproof and occasionally you’ll have to go back and manually blend a difficult image using Photomatix or something similar, but, on the whole, LR Enfuse does a superb job. Shot on a Canon EOS 5D Mk III – EF8-15F4L Images: Springbrook National Park, QLD – Twin Falls. Choose File / Plug-in Extras / Blend Exposures using LR Enfuse. Now select all the stacks that are made up of your three exposure brackets (command or control-click to multi-select).ĥ. If you mix them up with single captures it’s possible that you’ll get a few odd stacks.Ĥ. Choose Photo / Collapse All Stacks and you should now see single stacks each containing the images which make up each exposure blend sequence.Īuto-stacking is not foolproof, but you will soon get the hang of it – the trick is to make sure the folder only contains bracketed images that need stacking. Adjust the slider and you’ll see them stack and unstack in ‘real time’. Set this to about three seconds and Lightroom should collect all your sets of bracketed images into stacks because they will normally have been shot less than three seconds apart. In the Library Module, view the folder of the images you just imported and choose Photo / Stacking / Auto-stack by Capture Time. Import the images into Lightroom as per usual.ģ. I normally set the auto-bracket to plus and minus 2 stops which seems to cover most high contrast scenes.Ģ. Shoot your exposure blend image sets as normal – I recommend using the two-second self-timer combined with auto-bracket so that you get all three shots with one press of the shutter button. The guys who write these plugins do need support – I’d suggest $10 – $20 – but it’s up to youġ. The good news is that the full version is donationware and when you find out just how genuinely useful it is you’ll be happy to pay a modest amount. This is free to download but is restricted to work only on low resolution images. You need Lightroom and a Lightroom plug-in called LR/Enfuse. What if I told you I do most of my exposure blends automatically? If you are like me, the thought of individually exposure-blending a whole load of images is just not what photography is all about – I know I can produce better images with better tonal range this way but it seems like a lot of work in front of the computer. Maybe you don’t shoot multiple exposures in the first place because you don’t want to spend hours in front of the computer blending together the individual images. Do you ever shoot a bunch of exposure-bracketed shots and then never get around to blending them together? ![]()
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