Blending car light trails and night lighting

Introduction

When shooting at night, we often find it impossible to light ruins properly in a single exposure and have to photograph them several times, lighting different sections.

Another common problem occurs when capturing light trails from moving vehicles: we cannot get all the trails we want in a single exposure. 

Contents

In both cases, we need several photographs to achieve the properly lit result we want.

In this tutorial, we will combine those exposures using the Lighten blending mode and use layer masks to choose which part of each photograph to include.

Software used

Adobe Photoshop

Editing and RAW development

Raya Pro panel

Exposure blending