Master Light Trails in 15 minutes

Do you want to shoot great-looking light trails? Follow along, and I'll show you how.

Do you want to shoot great-looking light trails? Follow along, and I'll show you how.

Hi, my name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this is Coffee Break Photography. So, today, I'm going to talk about how we're going to go about shooting light trails. Light trails will get car headlights and car brake lights coming past the camera, and they form a nice trail showing you where they've travelled from and to. Obviously, you need to do that at night, and you can see right now that it isn't nighttime.

That's because before I start shooting, I want to talk about the different phases of the sky as we go from daylight into evening. So, right now, we're in a phase called the golden hour. The golden hour is when the sun is six degrees above the horizon all the way down to zero degrees, and that's where we get this nice golden light that's just hitting the side of my face right now. It's great for portraits and a really good time to start shooting and photographing people.

We then move into the blue hour. The blue hour is when the sun goes from zero degrees to six degrees below the horizon, and that's when we get these nice blue colours in the sky as the sun sets. It starts off as a kind of light purple colour, goes to a light blue colour, and then all the way through to a really dark, inky blue. That hour period, that blue hour, is the best time to shoot light trails, and that's because the red brake lights and the white headlights are going to really look nice offset against that inky blue sky.

So, we're going to do a little process that I've devised just in case it's not busy on the street, and we don't have cars coming past us on both sides of the road. So I'll show you how I shoot it, and then we're going to head back into the office, and I'm going to show you how I edit these pictures. So, let's head down to Princess Street. Let's see how it goes.

Hi there. We just had an amazing sunset over Edinburgh, so I've come down onto Princess Street, where we're going to be shooting the light trail images. The key to light trail images is to have traffic coming on both sides, so we'll get brake lights on one side and headlights on the other side. Now, the problem with my location at the moment is that I can't guarantee that cars will come towards me and away from me at the same time.

I'm going to use a technique where we take multiple images of light trails and then join them together later in Photoshop. To get a light trail, we want to have an exposure as long as possible so that I will set it to 30 seconds. My ISO will be 100, and then I'll adjust the aperture so that my light meter is set to minus one. Shooting at minus one brings out some of the darker colours in the sky.

I also want to ensure my camera doesn't move between exposures. So, for these pictures, I will be using the app on my mobile phone, which will allow me to make sure that I don't press the shutter button and inadvertently move the camera very gently. Even though I'm shooting on a really stable, strong tripod, I don't want to have any variance between the pictures.

I'm also going to be using back button shutter which if you watch last week's video, you'll see how to set that up. And that's again so that this focus point will always be in the same position for every image. So we won't have any variation between each thing I'm taking. So, let's go ahead and start shooting, and I'll tell you the next step.

Okay, that's all our light trail images in the bag. I want to do one final picture, and you can see we've got a lovely inky blue sky. So, to get the sky picture, I want to get the best quality image I can because I'm also going to use some of the buildings we've got on either side of the road in this part of the image. So I'm going to change my aperture to about f11, and because I've got more light coming in. I'll shoot an f11 instead of f22, which my original shots were taken with for the light trails. I need to make my shutter speed faster to rebalance the exposure. So, one more shot. I'll take the image. I'm not too bothered about getting light trails this time because I will only use the sky and the buildings on either side for this picture. So let's take the shot, and then we'll head down to the office, and I'll show you how to combine all these images to make a fantastic light trail picture.

Okay, so we're in the office now after shooting the light trail images on Princes Street in Edinburgh, and you can see I've selected five images here on the screen—first one, I quite like the light trail coming on the right-hand side. The second image's light trail is pretty good. I quite like it. I might use this. In the third image, this is a light trail I probably prefer a little bit more. I like the movement of the light trail through here and the fact that the bus is over there. But you can see the number 63 in this image. I don't like these two buses on this side. On the next one, 64. They are OK Light trails. I could use them, but maybe not. I'm still determining whether or not to do this one. The final one is the picture of the sky. So this is where we're going to use the sky a bit later on. And you can see again, in these pictures in number 65, image 65 down here, we've got these two buses, which I don't want to be in the shot.

So, I will select numbers five, three, and one. I'm going to just put a pick marker by pressing the letter P. This means I can then filter these three images down here. So, I've now got the three images all selected.

If I want to make any changes to these images before I start merging them in Photoshop, I can do this all in one go. So, with them all selected, one of the things I want to change with my light trail images is the white balance. I'm going to change the white balance to fluorescent. So we've got nice, darker blue and fluorescent lights that are more like what we have on the street. So, we're getting closer to the colours of how we shot the images.

So, I'm now ready to take these into Photoshop. We will right-click on the image and take the option edit in. Instead of clicking on edit in Photoshop, which is the usual thing that people may do, I will come down to this section, which is open as layers in Photoshop. It will take a couple of seconds to transfer the images from Lightroom to Photoshop. While it does that, I can explain the layers.

As you can see on the right-hand side, the layers are starting to load. If you imagine layers as pieces of acetate, each image is a piece of acetate. And we've now put each of the three pieces of acetate on top of each other. And at the moment, you can see what's in the content of the top acetate or the top layer. If I click this little eye button here, it will show you what's below the top layer. So we've now got the light trail on the left-hand side. When I click on the next eye, we go down to the bottom image. Now, you can see a slight difference in where the buses were as I moved between the two. I don't think there's any difference in the actual image; it's just that the buses may have moved slightly.

So, just to make sure the images haven't moved, I'm going to select all three images, go to the Layer menu, and take the option Align. I'm going to align with the bottom edges. So, if there is any discrepancy between the images, this is going to align all three of them together.

Okay, so we will start changing our images and using the information in the three pictures to create our light trail. The first thing I want to do is bring the light trails to the front. Like I said, at the moment, all you see is what's in the top layer. We can change something called a blending mode. The blending modes are in the layers panel. Click on the button, and we've got a number of different options. We're going to use the one called Lighten. As you can see, Lighten brings all the lightest things in each of the images to the front. So I clicked on there. You can now see we've got the light trails from the right-hand side and light trails from the left-hand side, which all look good.

But the problem I've got is that it's also brought the lightest sky. So it's the lightest sky from the very first image I took up here, and I want the dark blue, inky sky. So I'm going to do something a bit different now to bring that dark sky to the front.

The first thing I'm going to do is create a group. I'm going to select the two images we have as light trails. I'm going to click on the group button down here. You can see it's now created a group. If I want to remind myself what's in the group, I can double-click on its title, which we can call a light trail. I click on this little arrow, which shows you the two layers in between.

Okay, so the first thing I'm going to do is right-click on the group. I'm going to duplicate this group. Okay, I'll show you why in a second. It's quite important. Inside the duplicate groups, you can see it says light trail copy.

I’m going to select these two layers. I will go up to the layer image, and we will merge the layers. Okay, so this is just going to merge the selected layers so they're one layer together, and that one layer now has this light trail on the left-hand side and light trail on the right side together as one shot. The reason we're going to do this is that we want to select the sky, which isn't light trails. So I could go to the select menu and select sky, and you can see it goes away, has a little think, and it's selected most of the sky.

It's got a little problem down here. I'm going to make my cursor smaller. It's not selected the sky in this layer, a bit here, and a little bit of sky up here. That's one way to do it, but it doesn't work very well. So I'm going to deselect by pressing command and D, and instead, we're going to use the select option again, but we're going to use a select color range.

Okay, so I've, it comes over this little box here. I want it to keep the thing here at sampled colours. I'm going to use the quick mask option so I can now go over to the sky and click on the sky with my eyedropper tool. Anything white has been selected, anything black is not selected, and you see anything in red is not selected; anything which is now the sky colour indicated has been selected. By pressing my shift key, you see it adds a little plus sign. I can add in extra elements of the sky and all the parts that we weren’t selecting before getting those added in. I think we've got a pretty good selection. Probably just take that element up there. So we've now got the selection I wanted, and I will click OK.

Okay, that has selected the sky, but I don't want to select the sky; I want to select everything that isn't the sky. So we can go to the select menu and click on inverse, which has now selected everything that isn't the sky so you can see the little dotted marching ants going around the entire area. I'm finished with this group; I don't need to see it anymore, so I'm going to click on the light trail copy group, right-click, and delete the group. We're going to delete the group and its contents, and we're now left with our original image. But as you can see, it's kept the selection inside here.

So that's great, we've now got everything which isn't the sky selected, and I'm going to use an option now which is called a layer mask. A layer mask is this little button, down here, The third one, if I click on the layer mask, it applies this. You can see the dark blue sky coming through. The principal layers are over here, where the layer mask is now visible. Anything black has been masked, showing you what's below the image. So, below the group is the original image; anything white has been taken from these two layers. So that's great.

You can also apply the layer mask manually, so I'll make sure that my background colour, sorry, my foreground colour is set to black. If you've got different colours, click on this icon here, and you can switch between black and white. So, you want the top one to be black, so select your brush up here as you selected already. You can do that by pressing the letter B, and as long as it's black, I can now paint in, for instance, the clock tower. I can paint in the original, showing when I had the darkest blue sky, just before five o'clock. So I've manually added to that layer. That's really good. I've now got the dark blue sky. I've changed the time here. The things I don't like though are these two buses down here. I want to get rid of these buses.

If you remember, those buses were on image 63 and image number 65. So, I'm going to apply another layer of mask. So, first of all, to 63, I will apply a layer mask just to the image. So you can see at the moment, everything's white. So, everything in this image will be seen through the layer masks. My foreground color is still set to black. I'm going to make my brush a little bit bigger, and I can now paint in the buses or paint in black on top of these buses.

You can see that the layer mask has been painted black, but the buses haven't disappeared. The reason they haven't disappeared is that they're also in this layer. So again, apply another layer mask, paint over these, and this time, all the buses have disappeared.

So, I've now got a really nice image. There are no distracting buses here, and there is a nice shape coming down this way. Everything looks great. Before I take this back into Lightroom, I want to do something called flattening the image.

I'm going to flatten the image because it is currently a really large file. You've got three images, each around 50 megabytes, plus three-layer masks. So that ends up to around 300 megabytes of data here before we save it as a TIFF file.

So go to the layer menu again and click on flatten image. As you can see, it has now changed all the layers into one single layer, which is called background. Let's go to the file menu and click on Close in Photoshop.

It will ask if you want to save the image and how you want to save it this time. It takes a few seconds to save the image. Once that's done, we'll head into Lightroom. And there, you can see we have our edited image with light trails inside of it.

If you want to make any changes now, we could increase the shadows here, maybe add a little bit of texture to the image, and give it a little bit of clarity. And we've got a really nice shot: two sets of light trails, a nice blue sky, and it looks totally natural.

And there we have it—a great way to photograph and then edit some great-looking light trail images. This is one of the techniques that I cover in my night photography workshop here in Edinburgh, Scotland. If you're interested in joining the workshop, go to edinburghphotographyworkshop.com. You'll be able to see all the available dates and book online there.

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