is there a trick to stacking ocean waves?

bribrius · Apr 20, 2015

i just spent two hours looking through and stacking a ocean landscape and it looks like chit. Enough i am afraid to post it. Apparently waves don't stack well. Part of it is totally blurred, it thought it was ghosting. The rest, man i just dunno. messy, messy.

Designer · Apr 20, 2015

Was the wave stationary, or was it moving?

480sparky · Apr 20, 2015

Stacking, as in focus stacking?

bribrius · Apr 20, 2015

480sparky said:
Stacking, as in focus stacking?

exposure and hdr

bribrius · Apr 20, 2015

think i am going to try it again, maybe with less images.

Msteelio91 · Apr 20, 2015

Designer said:
Was the wave stationary, or was it moving?

Uh.

Overread · Apr 20, 2015

Sometimes you have to do it manually with the layer tools and layer masks

bribrius · Apr 20, 2015

Overread said:
Sometimes you have to do it manually with the layer tools and layer masks

i was wondering. As i have seen stacked ocean images but can't seem to figure out how they stack the waves. I know i am not having much luck.

bribrius · Apr 20, 2015

Designer said:
Was the wave stationary, or was it moving?

you are kidding right?

480sparky · Apr 20, 2015

bribrius said:
i was wondering. As i have seen stacked ocean images but can't seem to figure out how they stack the waves. I know i am not having much luck.

Some people take a single image in raw, and change the levels in post to simulate a + and - exposures, saving the two as different filenames. Then it's simple procedure to blend them, and nothing has moved between 'exposures'.

Dave442 · Apr 20, 2015

I would think this would be a manual process, unless there is some special wave software. I would think that for every EV change it would require multiple exposures to be able to find one from that set that could blend into into the base image. Probably what Sparky said is the way to go, with just a one image HDR for the waves, and could still try a normal HDR on the rest of the scene.

bribrius · Apr 20, 2015

Dave442 said:
I would think this would be a manual process, unless there is some special wave software. I would think that for every EV change it would require multiple exposures to be able to find one from that set that could blend into into the base image. Probably what Sparky said is the way to go, with just a one image HDR for the waves, and could still try a normal HDR on the rest of the scene.

yeah, sparky is usually right (don't tell him i said that). I don't know how to separate the waterfront from the rest of the scene. Not really into this kind of chit just try to learn something new occasionally. Not having fun. I quit.