I thought I'd have a go so I headed for the hills and set up the camera on the tripod and took one picture every minute. The one thing you MUST do if you try this is to load in a new set of batteries before you start as your camera is going to be on for quite a while. I had planned to run the sequence for an hour (60 pics) but the batteries failed after 40 minutes. If I'd taken the camera off of the tripod to replace the batteries I would not have been able to perfectly align the camera again, but 40 pics were enough for a test run.
Once I got home I fired up Photoshop and used the following process:
Once I got home I fired up Photoshop and used the following process:
1. Drag all the images into Photoshop in the correct order. Press Enter after each image is dragged in to Place it.
2. Right-click the bottom layer (the background layer) and select Layer from background then click OK.
3. Go back to the top layer and set the layer blending mode to Lighten and set the opacity to 70%.
4. Right-click the top layer and select Copy layer style.
5. Select the next layer down, hold down shift then select the bottom layer to select all the other layers.
6. With all the other layers still selected, right-click and select Paste Layer Style.
7. Save the file as a .PSD (this will take a while and will produce a huge file).
8. When the .PSD has saved save it again but as a .JPG.
9. You now have an image that you can tweek.
2. Right-click the bottom layer (the background layer) and select Layer from background then click OK.
3. Go back to the top layer and set the layer blending mode to Lighten and set the opacity to 70%.
4. Right-click the top layer and select Copy layer style.
5. Select the next layer down, hold down shift then select the bottom layer to select all the other layers.
6. With all the other layers still selected, right-click and select Paste Layer Style.
7. Save the file as a .PSD (this will take a while and will produce a huge file).
8. When the .PSD has saved save it again but as a .JPG.
9. You now have an image that you can tweek.
I adjusted the levels and contrast and used a gradient mask to balance the levels across the image.
Here's my effort:
Clearly not as spectacular as Matt's. However, this was good practice as I realised that there's more to it than taken a load of pictures and dropping them into Photoshop. The clouds in my set were moving from left to right and the images were taken in bright daylight. Matt creates his images with the clouds coming towards him to produce a dramatic perspective. Also, most of his images are of sunsets which gives a dramatic contrast of light and dark. And there is the fact that Matt uses up to 1000 images where as I used just 40.
Since I created my image I've found a YouTube tutorial produced by Matt:
He uses a slightly different technique to mine but it's essentially the same.
You can see more of Matt Molloys time stacks on his Flickr:
Photoshop for Free
If you don't have Photoshop and can't afford to 'rent' it from Adobe's cloud (you can't buy a version which you install on your PC/Mac anymore - you have to run it from the Adobe cloud), Adobe are currently offering a free download of Photoshop CS2 and loads of other previous versions of their software from:
You'll need to create a free Adobe account but once you do you should be able to download loads of software free and legally.
If, by the time you read this Adobe have suspended the above, this site:
have effectively mirrored the Adobe download page and you won't need to set up an Adobe account in order to download.
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