Sunset & Light trails
A rework of the similar shot posted several weeks ago. Taken over the A6 at Chinley in the Peak District
Looking at the EXIF data I spent nearly an hour and a half on the bridge holding the camera on the guardrail with no tripod waiting for the light to change sufficiently to get the road and valley, then the sunset, and much much later, the light trails.
This version represents a significant time investment - perhaps the most I have spent on a single image. In the first version the light trails were as shot, with 20 second exposures, but these are actually stroked paths. There is absolutely no way to tell them apart other than that these are perhaps too good to be true.
I learnt a new trick or two in the making of this image. It dawned on me that when using the Clone and Healing brush tools, using lighten or darken brush blending modes would very often completely negate the need for a mask. So long as the source pixels are darker than the target pixels, but not as dark as the area you don’t want to cover, then ‘darken’ works perfectly. I never get too anal about accuracy , finding it so much easier to sort things out later with layer masks.
The other trick was a matter of RTFM to suss out how to make the stroked path taper along its length, which was simply achieved with a few Brush Shape Dynamic settings.
Sunset & Light trails
A rework of the similar shot posted several weeks ago. Taken over the A6 at Chinley in the Peak District
Looking at the EXIF data I spent nearly an hour and a half on the bridge holding the camera on the guardrail with no tripod waiting for the light to change sufficiently to get the road and valley, then the sunset, and much much later, the light trails.
This version represents a significant time investment - perhaps the most I have spent on a single image. In the first version the light trails were as shot, with 20 second exposures, but these are actually stroked paths. There is absolutely no way to tell them apart other than that these are perhaps too good to be true.
I learnt a new trick or two in the making of this image. It dawned on me that when using the Clone and Healing brush tools, using lighten or darken brush blending modes would very often completely negate the need for a mask. So long as the source pixels are darker than the target pixels, but not as dark as the area you don’t want to cover, then ‘darken’ works perfectly. I never get too anal about accuracy , finding it so much easier to sort things out later with layer masks.
The other trick was a matter of RTFM to suss out how to make the stroked path taper along its length, which was simply achieved with a few Brush Shape Dynamic settings.