Turn Video Into a Brilliant Long Exposure Photo in Photoshop

This is a technique I hadn't come across before, but now I've seen it, I can't believe I haven't used it before. Turn your time-lapse videos into long exposure photographs, easily.

Video quality has taken such greedy, gaping strides over the last decade that it has aged footage much quicker than ever before. The quality is now so high that pulling stills from a video and using them as a photograph is just starting to be viable in the higher end of standards. In fact, just this week I was working on a video project for a client and I was discussing what I was doing with a professional photographer friend of mine. I sent him an exported frame of my video to show him what I was shooting and he mistook the frame as a photograph I had taken, and presumed I wasn't shooting video at all. I doubt the frame got more than a cursory look over, but even a glance could easily disseminate video screen grab from photograph until recently.

In this video, PiXimperfect takes that quality one step further. By exporting all frames of selected portion of a video as still images, you can load them into a stack in Photoshop and automate the blending of the layers in to one averaged image, which creates an almost identical effect to a long exposure image.

Have you ever used a video to create a long exposure photograph? What was your experience with it?

Rob Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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