Image Stacking Archives - Digital Urban

Image Stacking: 8400 Images – Day and Night in the City

Andy — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:25:00 +0000

Using our recent tutorial on image stacking it is possible to stack images from both day and night to create a single image of the city skyline over time. The photograph below consists of 8400 images taken using a Go Pro HD with one image every 5 seconds. The streak of light to the left is the moon during the night time sequence, while the right hand light is the daytime sun. The small lights are aircraft during the evening:

You can view a higher resolution version on our Flickr Stream, we will have more on the Go Pro HD next week, including a tutorial to create 24 hour+ timelapses.

The post Image Stacking: 8400 Images – Day and Night in the City appeared first on Digital Urban.

Image Stacking: 8400 Images – Day and Night in the City

Andy — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:25:00 +0000

You can view a higher resolution version on our Flickr Stream, we will have more on the Go Pro HD next week, including a tutorial to create 24 hour+ timelapses.

The post Image Stacking: 8400 Images – Day and Night in the City appeared first on Digital Urban.

Tutorial: Photoshop Image Stacking for Day Trails

Andy — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:51:00 +0000

Creating star trails is a well known technique in Astrophotography and the same technique can be used to create trails of activity during the day. The results are both unique and potentially useful to identify heavily used routes or flows in urban areas.

You will need:

1 x Timelapse System, you can use a simple webcam as per our previous Tutorial: Torch + Webcam = HD Timelapse System a DSLR such as the Canon G9 with CHDK , a iPhone with the free Gorrilacam app or any camera that can take photos at regular intervals.

1 x Copy of Photoshop, you can download a 30 day trial.

1 x Photoshop Stacking Action (thanks to Deep Space Astrophotography)

Time Taken, 2 Hours (including capture and processing).

Setting Up

The concept is simple, set up your camera, webcam or iphone at a suitable location, and capture an image at regular intervals, for our example we captured an image every 2 seconds pointing down at a London street:

We left the camera running for an hour capturing 1800 images, saved into a folder on our computer.

The next step is to open photoshop and start stacking the images.

Image Stacking in Photoshop

The images will be stacked onto of an intially blank image via a simple automated action:

1) Create a new blank black image the same size are your captured photographs.

2) Load the action into the action windows in Photoshop and load the action Startrails.atn.

3) In Photoshop click ‘File’, ‘Automate’ and ‘Batch’. Select the action you have just loaded and choose your directory with the images as source and make sure you select ‘None’ for the output directory.

Click ‘Ok’ and leave it running, our Mac laptop took around an hour to stack the images – resulting in the ‘Day Trail’ below:

You can clearly see the path of the traffic and the most utilised sections of the walkways over the hour, we simply like the effect.

We have created a Day Trail pool on Flickr if you create a stacked image feel free to add it to the pool…

The post Tutorial: Photoshop Image Stacking for Day Trails appeared first on Digital Urban.

Aircraft over the City: Night Time Activity Patterns using Image Stacking

Andy — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:48:00 +0000

The image below is our first take at using a technique known as ‘image stacking’ to capture activities in the skies above London at night.

Comprised of 1700 photographs taken 10 seconds apart it is possible to identify City Airport (on the left) and the flightpath to Heathrow. Its not going to win any photography awards but by simply using a low cost webcam mounted inside a waterproof torch it is possible to get some interesting views of the city and the skyline.

The timelapse below strings together the single images used:

Air Traffic Timelapse over London from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Of course during the day the webcam can be used for regular timelapses, as the movie below illustrates:

London Summers Day from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Music by Ghostlight via mp3unsigned.com

The movie above was captured with a frame every five seconds, making for a smooth timelapse, towards the end you can begin to note the aircraft above the skyline.

When we get back up on the roof we will take a photograph of the setup and provide details on how to make your own timelapses and stacked images.

The post Aircraft over the City: Night Time Activity Patterns using Image Stacking appeared first on Digital Urban.