step by step / Combine your light paintings

Learn how to combine several light-painted frames into a single image with Photoshop

When photographing a large scene like a landscape it can be tricky to light everything you want to illuminate in a single frame, even if painting with light. The solution is to shoot several frames and then blend them together afterwards in Photoshop. This also gives you the option to pick and choose the frames you want to include in the finished composite. Blending the frames takes just a few moments. We start by loading them all into layers, then perfect the alignment before finally using the Lighten blending mode so that only the lighter areas on each layer show through. 1 Choose your frames

Open all of your photos into Adobe Bridge and select the ones you want to use by holding Cmd/ctrl and clicking to highlight the specific ones that you want to use.

2 Load into layers

In Adobe Bridge, go to Tools> Photoshop>load Files into Photoshop Layers. Once open in Photoshop, go to Window>layers for the Layers panel.

3 Align the layers

To ensure all the images are aligned, Cmd/ctrl-click between the top and bottom layers to highlight them and then go to Edit>auto-align Layers. Choose Auto.

4 Crop the edges

The Auto-align command can sometimes leave the image with slightly messy edges. If it has, then grab the Crop tool and crop in slightly to remove them.

5 Blend the layers

Go to the Layers panel. If the layers aren’t still highlighted then do so again. Next, go to the blending mode drop-down menu, at the top of the layer stack, and choose Lighten.

6 Enhance the tones

Apply any final tonal tweaks. Merge all the layers (Cmd/ Ctrl+shift+alt+e) then go to Filter>camera Raw Filter and use the tonal controls as you like.