Today i'm talking about image averaging to help you get cleaner images with less noise
there are a few intermediate skills you need to know in photography like bracketing focus stacking
and panoramas and these will really help build on the skills that you have now there is one that's
not so common that can really help you get much cleaner looking images and this is image averaging
this is a technique that has become common with wide field astrophotography recently but it's
not so common for landscape cityscape and aerial photography it's where you take a series of photos
from exactly the same location and then blend them together to give you a cleaner looking image
noise is always there in your image if there's more detail it will be less obvious but sometimes
if you have a big open area of single color in your shot the noise starts to come through
a lot earlier than you'd think and this is where image averaging can get rid of that unwanted noise
now image averaging only really works for certain shots if you have a lot of movement in your frame
it's not so good for that but if you take a landscape that doesn't have much motion in it
you can take a series of shots and blend them together afterwards so let's say you're out
walking you don't have your tripod with you but you can get a good shot with the iso at 6400
you can take a burst of say 10 shots and then blend them together afterwards in photoshop
as long as your hands are steady enough you should be able to blend them together successfully this
is not always the case but editing programs are getting better and better as time goes by
and this is great with smaller sets of cameras where the noise might become visible at lower isos
if i'm out and about the light is dropping and i don't have my tripod with me what i'll do is
shoot a burst of images where the shutter is high enough for shooting handheld keeping the
camera as still as possible photoshop is actually really good at the auto align as long as you don't
move the camera around too much also if you shoot photography with a drone shooting a burst of 5 to
10 photos will help you average out the details and get rid of any noise that might occur in your
frame if you have the mavic 2 you have the option of a burst mode i have the mini 2 and i just have
to take a load of shots in quick succession as long as the drone stays still and as long
as it's not too windy you can successfully get a load of shots to blend together afterwards again
using this auto-align feature and because of that small sensor if the light is dropping a bit again
you'll get a lot of noise in a single frame and by blending them together you'll get rid of a lot of
that noise i already used this in astrophotography i covered it in a previous tutorial if you haven't
seen that yet click on the i in the corner or the link in the description it is a way of getting
a much cleaner image of the night sky so if you can take a sequence of shots blend them together
it will get rid of a lot of that noise when you're doing it with aerial photography
landscapes or cityscapes you don't have the hassle of lining up the stars with that rotation
of the earth now with that drone shot i took you probably noticed that the c looks very different
when you do a mean average of the images any movement will blur and the c does look as if it's
a long exposure and this is a way you can kind of cheat to get the shot where it looks like you
had a much longer exposure than you actually did you can also use this for waterfalls as well if
you don't have an nd filter or if you've forgotten your nd filters you just need to get your exposure
as long as you can once again you take a series of 5 to 10 even 20 shots and then average them
out to get a shot that looks like it was taken with a much longer exposure than it actually was
this way isn't perfect and if you have any gaps between the shots it is quite easy to see those
gaps especially if it's clouds moving through the sky or if there's any other movement in the shot
but for things like waterfalls you can very easily make the exposure look longer than it actually was
to blend them together you do need photoshop and it is really easy there are two ways to do it the
first way is to bring the images into photoshop as layers in one image you auto align them
and change the opacities of each layer to shoot
this works best if you keep the bottom layer at 100
the next layer at 50 percent third layer at 33
the fourth layer at 25
fifth layer at 20
the sixth layer at 17
the seventh layer to 14
the eighth layer to 12.5 percent the ninth layer to 11 and the 10th layer to 10
the second way is to load all of the images as layers once again
or to align them and then select them all go to layer select smart object
convert to smart object then layer smart object stack mode and then mean
this way is a much easier way if you have over 10 images and to be honest it's a much easier
way anyway i've started using this method with my a6600 and i'm getting much cleaner images
from photos in the evening of still subjects as well as when i'm using my drone for photographs
and like i've been doing for a while with my astro photography i do prefer getting
things in one shot but sometimes if there isn't enough light your subject is static
and you can keep the camera still enough to fire up a series of images this is a viable option
to clean up the noise in your photographs without changing that photograph too much
now blending your images to clean up your shot is one thing but what do you guys think about
sky replacement it is a really contentious issue in photography and i talk about it in
this next video so if you're thinking about sky replacements you need to watch this now
you