From the course: Photoshop Layers: Working with Multiple Photos (2018)

Using stack modes - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop Layers: Working with Multiple Photos (2018)

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Using stack modes

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- Once all of the layers have been loaded into a stack or a Smart Object, it's time to take advantage of the stack modes. We used this technique earlier when combining multiple images and we wanted to remove things. Now what we're looking to do is to combine the images and add up the brighter areas. Now, with the layer selected, I'll choose Layer, Smart Objects, Stack Mode. There's many different choices here, but what we're looking to do is to combine things so I'm going to try Maximum so it adds up. This will combine the brighter areas and give us an image that's brighter overall. It will need to be color corrected and tonality adjusted slightly, but it's still a cool effect. And you see the star trails are created. This circular point here is because this is the point of rotation. Now, depending upon where you point and shoot, there's part of the Earth that rotates less. Think of this as basically the axis overhead, and so this is pointing into the North Pole area and this is where we were actually rotating around. So you can see as the Earth spun how it moved past the stars. Let's try another stack mode here, see if it works better. Smart Objects, Stack Mode, and we'll try the Mean. Well, that gave us a perfectly clear sky but not the results I was hoping for, so I'm just choose Undo and go back. Now it's pretty simple. Let's combine another image in here to restore some details. I'll go back into the set and just open up one of the raw files. With that image open, it's very easy to add it back in. Select all. Copy. Close it. And just choose Edit, Paste. Now I'll grab the Quick Selection tool, a tool we learned about earlier when we did our sports composite, and I can make a quick selection of the rocks. There we go. I'll choose Select and Mask. And use the Smart Radius option here to control the mask. Easy enough. Little bit of feather. And we'll output that to the Layer Mask. Now that's restoring the rock details the way that I want it.

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