What's new
By:
Photoshop Gurus Forum

Welcome to Photoshop Gurus forum. Register a free account today to become a member! It's completely free. Once signed in, you'll enjoy an ad-free experience and be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Cloud Effect


I'm 99.9% sure that he must have taken a large number of short-to-medium length exposures (each, a max of a few seconds) over a long period of time (many minutes), and then stacks them together digitally using the "Lighten" layer blending mode. This technique is now the standard for long exposures of the night sky to get star trails, and there is even specialized software (some free) available to do this. This technique would also explain (at least partially) the unique "starting edge" seen many of his clouds.

I also strongly suspect that he used manual exposure mode and changed the aperture between individual shots (ie, over the long duration) to get the very nice fade-out effects.

I'm less sure of this, but if there is not enough sharp detail that is consistent from one exposure to the next in the stack, I can easily imagine that he would consider putting a series of radiating dark, narrow lines on the top layer, change its blending mode to multiply, adjust the opacity to taste, and paint them in where there are clouds or wherever he saw fit to do so.

Just my $0.02,

Tom
 
Last edited:
A couple other thoughts ...

1. Obviously, his camera was mounted on a rock steady tripod.

2. If he allows there to be a gap in time between the end of one exposure and the beginning of the next, there would have been a series of parallel striae arrayed perpendicular to the "direction of motion" of the clouds. Since no such striae are visible in this photo, he obviously had almost gap in time between his individual exposures. This is the standard problem with star trail photography -- if you don't pay attention to this potential problem, the star trails will come out looking like a bunch of dashed lines, not continuous circles.

T
 
Tom mann- would it be alright if I were to go step by step with you in recreating this photo sometime down the line. Really intrigued with this effect and would like to re-create it.
 
Dear "mesjdslsmeo0418" -

I'm sorry, but your post provides no help to the OP.

You need to be *much more* specific. For example, you could have stated and then demonstrated which tools in Photoshop would be the most use in achieving the effect he wants.

You could also have provided a link to the tutorial you mentioned. There are probably hundreds of thousands of photoshop tutorials available on the web. How is he to know which one you are thinking of? If you can't yet post active links, you could have written it out in English, e.g., "www (dot) adobe (dot) com".

Tom M
 
Back
Top