composite sunset

Saw some images I thought were neat, like here and here.

Reading up, they had been done by taking a time-lapse series of photos, then merging them with Photoshop layer blending in "lighten" mode, which selects pixels from the next photo which are lighter than the ones in the original photo.

Not being all that good with photoshop and wanting to merge 500 photos, I turned to ImageMagick, which I could script in Korn Shell. Turns out IM has the 'composite' command which performs the same merge using the '-compose lighten' option. So I whipped together this:

 

$ convert IMG_6999.JPG composite_test.tif

$ for n in {7000..7500}

> do

> convert IMG_${n}.JPG next.tif

> composite -compose lighten next.tif composite_test.tif composite_${n}.tif

> mv composite_${n}.tif composite_test.tif

> rm next.tif

> echo $n done

> done

(Not bad for 2am, eh?)

 

And this is the result. After a bit of editing in PS - notably doing spot-healing on all the hotpixels, which pop out dramatically.

 

 

Done