Finding them in the Photoshop stack, with a very narrow hard brush set to 100% opacity/flow, paint black over the trail of light on the offending frames.
Aircraft trails, foreground lighting, etc, all can turn an awesome set of trails into a cluttered mess.įor aircraft trails, I usually go back to Lightroom and scan through the base files there for where the trail starts/ends and note those file numbers. Star trail images are rarely as simple as selecting all the images and hitting ‘go’ on Lighten mode. Just select all, and change blend mode from ‘Normal’ to ‘Lighten’Īgain, I can’t promise how old of a version of Photoshop this works on, if you have an older version of Photoshop CC or v6 still in use, give this a go and let me know what you discover. Second, scroll to the bottom of your stack and select the second to the bottom layer – the first layer you want to set to Lighten, and set the blend mode. If you know where to look.įirst, load all your base images into Photoshop into a single stack (File -> Script >- Load Images into Stack from Photoshop, load from Bridge, or Lightroom, etc).
It’s right there in Photoshop CC for the finding. But fear not! Photoshop made it amazingly simple to set all those annoying layers to the same blend mode without needing a script, an action, or anything. I found several panels and the like that worked in CS5 or CS6, but not the latest Photoshop CC which I am a subscriber to. The real question became, how much work would it take to reduce the amount of work. Knowing that there were plenty of smart photographers out there and that Photoshop had multiple ways to extend and enhance with actions, panels, scripts, and the like, I knew there had to be automated ways to do this.
#Startrail photoshop action update
The problem is, when you have 200+ layers, that can take a long time to go through each photo and update the blending mode on each. The root of the idea is to set each of your layers above the bottom layer to blending mode = ‘lighten’ – so the bright starts shine through on each subsequent layer. So I started researching other options, including stacking manually in Photoshop. Unfortunately, StarStax has some limitations, and I have suspected that the resulting star trail image wasn’t as high of quality as the input images. For the first year after I started working with Star Trail photography, I’ve used StarStax to blend my individual frames together into the trail photo.
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