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PROJECT 2
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STEP 1 USE A TRIPOD AND
INPUT THE RIGHT SETTINGS
Set up your camera on a tripod on a public
path overlooking a road to give you a high
perspective. Go into Live View and focus
on part of the road, about a third of the way
into the frame, then set your lens to
Manual Focus (MF) to lock it. Now, set your
camera to Manual mode (M), and input a
shutter speed of 30 secs, an aperture of
f/22 and ISO of 100, and set it to shoot
Raw. Take a test exposure and see if you’re
happy with the composition and overall
exposure of the photograph. If you think
that it’s too bright lower the shutter speed;
if it’s too dark, just boost the ISO a bit and
try again. Don’t be afraid to experiment.
STEP 2 MERGE YOUR
IMAGES IN PHOTOSHOP CC
You’ll likely end up with several decent light
trail images but in different parts of the shot.
For ours, we had a few photos where the red
brake light trails on the left were very strong,
but not enough trails from head lights on the
right. So, you’ll likely need to combine a few
images together to get a perfect result. To do
this, select all of the Raw trail pictures you
want to merge in Adobe Bridge and open
them into Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Raw.
Right-click one of the image thumbnails and
choose Select All, then you can make your
Raw edits to all of the images, meaning
Exposure slider settings and other
adjustments are consistent. Now, click Open
Images to bring them to Photoshop. Hit Ctrl/
Cmd+A to select one of the trails, Ctrl/
cmd+C to copy it and Ctrl/Cmd+W to close
the image down, and in another of your
shots hit Ctrl/Cmd+V to paste it in. Repeat
this until you’ve pasted in all of your light
trails, so they’re in a single Photoshop
document. Go to the Layers panel
(Window>Layers) and select all of the layers
and simply change the Blending Mode from
Normal to Screen to see all the layers
combined, revealing all of the light trails!