How to Simulate a Long Exposure in Photoshop

Long exposures are a highly popular look, but sometimes, you might not have an ND filter with you or you might not have decided to make a long exposure in the moment. If you have an image with potential that you think would look even better as a long exposure, this quick and helpful video tutorial will show you how to convincingly fake it using Photoshop.

Coming to you from Julieanne Kost with Adobe's official Photoshop channel, this fantastic video tutorial will show you how to simulate a long exposure using the Path Blur filter in Photoshop. Certainly, long exposures are a fun technique and a great way to explore your creativity, but sometimes, we might not come home with one for one reason or another, which is when this technique comes into play. As you will see, you will need to mask out any part of your photo that is not water or sky, so if you have a particularly complex horizon line that is not easily masked out via any of the normal techniques, you might want to think twice, but for an easier horizon, it is quite a neat method. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Kost. 

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Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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1 Comment

Very good post. Well presented. It seems as though every day were becoming more of a digital artist than a photographer.