Sharp low-noise photography using multiple photos

Step 7 Done! And a note on another method

Now you should have an image with low noise level, and a decent sharpness.
Collapse the layers, and/or crop the image to remove the blank areas that appeared along the edge as a result of the alignment.

... And there you go :) My example hasn't been cropped yet, so you can still see the blank areas.

Another way to do this is to just shoot all the photos with a high ISO sensitivity, combine them in photoshop with the same method, but instead of choosing "screen", use "Lighten" or "Lighter color".
I do not know what these do, but they seam to be the ones getting closest to taking the average color/brightness value of each pixel on each layer, which is the idea here.

EDIT

Instead, keep all layers at "normal" and just change the opacity of each layer to around 20% or something... That will get closer to the actual average.

Comments

[nieton]

I always thought of a technique like this but never tried it. Kudos for the guide man! =)

[yomero]

great instructable, kudos

[ELF]

Thanks :)

[aydiosmio]

If you're getting blurry photos with a tripod it's likely the shaking produced by pressing the shutter or the shutter opening is the problem. Using the Timer and/or the Mirror Lockup (if you have an SLR) features of your camera can fix this. Also, if you must use a high ISO or long exposure with a tripod, the Long Exposure Noise compensation feature does a noise profile of the sensor after each shot and digitally removes the noise. This can be done manually with applications like Noise Ninja.

[anca]

This is great. I can think of some situations where even with a tripod I was getting a noisy image, so using this system I could totally improve those photos. Thanks!

[robertBeech]

How about just using a tripod, instead?

[ELF]

If you haven't brought one along, you don't have one, you can't get your tripod in the right position... The technique can also be used to reduce just the noise, if the camera has a particularly noisy sensor. Like if you're making product shots...