Seeking new solution for older issue

[Hector]

Once upon a time there was an old trick I saw people do with film cameras that were capable of making multiple exposures. An image, say a field of flowers, was recorded multiple times on 1 negative with the camera mounted on a tripod or handheld. Calculating the exposure was tricky because there might be 16 or 32 or 180 different exposures on the same negative. Thank goodness that part is no longer necessary. If the wind was blowing that was even better. The resulting image, if done correctly, was really cool. It had a very impressionistic look. Since I haven't seen a digital camera capable of multiple exposures I guess this technique has moved to the digital darkroom and I am trying to figure out a way to do it.

One possiblity is to take the image and make a bunch of layers, but the trick then is to have each layer slightly off register with the others. Can this be done in PSE? How? Is there a better way to do this?

I know one of you experienced PSE users can figure this out and I have not done so yet.

Please let me know what ideas you have.

Thanks.:D

[Byron Gale]

...the trick then is to have each layer slightly off register with the others. Can this be done in PSE?...Hector,

I would suspect that the trick is to have each layer "partially" off register. Imagine your field of flowers, with multiple exposures taken from a stationary postion. When the wind blows, it moves the clouds, flowers and smaller tree branches. It does not move tree trunks and boulders and hills in the background.

So I think you will be stuck with actually getting multiple pictures, rather than faking it in PSE.

Then you can combine them into a single document as layers, and adjust the opacities so that each layer contributes equally to the image. It might be tedious, but it doesn't seem too difficult.

Byron

[graficalicus]

Hector & Byron- sounds interesting - here's my approach:

Multiple images taken with a tripod-mounted camera, as mentioned by Byron - then drag them sequentially into a single PSE document.

I'd use Layer Masks to eliminate static areas (tree trunks, houses, permanent objects...) or singular events (an airplane flying in the background, for instance) so that just the flowers are in the "moving" layers.

Experiment with opacity & blend to get the impressionist look. Another possibility might be to export as an animated gif or export the layers sequentially as jpg (to import into another app to output as an avi.)