add motion blur topics

Apply slow shutter speed effects to your pics

Streaks of motion blur can convey movement in action shots and produce a more dynamic-looking photo, or turn waterfalls into ephemeral light streaks. A skilled digital SLR user can choose a slow shutter speed setting on their camera to add this effect to photographs.

When shooting action with Apple’s Camera app for iOS, though, you can’t set the shutter speed manually. Indeed, to try to ‘improve’ iOS’s photographic results, most subjects are automatically captured using a fast shutter speed, which freezes every detail. To add motion blur to an iPhone shot, you could snap a Live Photo, then swipe up on the pic in the Photos app and choose the Long Exposure preset to turn your three-second clip into a motion-blurred streak. However, this ‘cheat’ tends to produce an abstract-looking blur effect that lacks any discernible detail.

Another advantage a digital SLR photographer has when shooting at slow shutter speeds is the ability to add in a quick burst of flash. This technique inserts a sharper key frame into a motion-blurred shot. This results in a kind of combination image, one where you can clearly see the subject but also get a sense of motion blur at the same time.

The results can be really impressive, but it’s also a real challenge to make the flash fire at the end of the exposure – so that the motion blur trails behind the subject. Fortunately, you can use Affinity Photo to recreate an effective long-exposure action shot without needing advanced photography skills, expensive camera equipment or luck.

Rapid-fire photos

In this example, we held down the Camera app’s shutter button to shoot a burst mode image of a child on a swing. Burst mode captures a series of sharp shots, which you can merge using Affinity Photo’s Stack tool. The Stack tool automatically aligns a series of handheld shots and then blends them together to create a motion-blurred subject. The static areas of the shot, such as the swing frame and background, remain nice and sharp.

To add a sharper version of the child to the composite image, and mimic a burst of flash, we used layer masks and the brush tool, as you’ll discover in our walkthrough.