STEP BY STEP / Piecing together the battlefield

1 Choose your shots

Open the images into Adobe Bridge. Go through and add a star rating (Cmd/ctrl+ 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5) to the photos you’d like to use (leave out the red LED ones), then go to the Filter panel (Window>filter) and click on the stars to filter so you can see your favourites shots.

3 Add a black mask

Go to the Layers panel (Window>layers). Click the eye icon to hide all but the bottom two layers, then look over the image and decide which areas you want to keep visible on the upper layer. Next hold Alt and click the Add Mask icon to hide the entire layer.

5 Blend the sparks

Go back to Bridge and highlight the red spark shots, then ‘Load Files into Photoshop Layers’. Once done, go to the Layers panel and Shift-click between the top and bottom layer. Go to the Blending Mode drop-down in the Layers panel and change it to Screen.

2 Load into layers

Click on the first image in the sequence then hold Shift and click on the last to select them all, then go to Tools>photoshop>load Files into Photoshop Layers. This opens all the images into Photoshop in a single document, with each image on a separate layer.

4 Paint layer masks

Grab the Brush tool, set your colour to white then paint to reveal the area you want visible on the layer. Next, highlight and reveal the next layer up in the stack and repeat the process. Continue until all the separate pieces of the scene are blended together.

6 Copy and reshape

Right-click over the layers in the Layers panel then Duplicate>layers. Set Destination to the other image and hit OK. Go to the other image and click through the sparks layers, adding layer masks to hide areas. You can reshape the sparks using the Liquify filter.