AFFINITY PHOTO
ADDING MOTION
No ND filter? Use the Stack feature in Affinity Photo to combine photos and blur waves with James Paterson
DOWNLOAD PROJECT FILES TO YOUR COMPUTER FROM: http://downloads. photoplusmag.com/pp214.zip
F ew photography effects can beat the look of a long exposure, especially the beautiful motion blur you get when shooting moving water with a slow shutter speed. During daylight hours, the sort of slow shutter speeds you need can usually only be achieved with the use of a neutral density filter, which reduces the flow of light into your camera. But sometimes you can be caught short without a neutral density filter and the water appears too choppy and detailed. If so, there’s another option. Using a tripod, shoot a series of frames in quick succession of the moving water and then blend them together afterwards in Affinity Photo.
It helps if the frames you intend to use are shot at your slowest possible speed. Here, our shots were taken with an aperture of f/16 and ISO100, allowing us to achieve a shutter speed of 1/2 sec at sunset. This was long enough to create a touch of blur in the waves, but nowhere near long enough to get the misty water effect in seascapes you really only see with exposures upwards of 30 seconds.
We’ll begin here by using the Stack feature in Affinity Photo to blend our frames with a neat trick that averages out the motion in each, then combine two blending methods before adding filters to enhance the blur. Finally, we can reveal parts from our original images to complete the effect.
It’s not quite as good as real in-camera motion blur, but it’s the next best thing.
STEP BY STEP BLUR THE WAVES IN YOUR SCENES
With photo stacking controls in Affinity Photo, you can replicate the look of motion blur in water
Use the start files or your own set of rapid-fire photos of waves or waterfalls. Open Affinity Photo then go to File > New Stack. Click Add and navigate to your images. Load them. Check Automatically Align Images if you shot the sequence handheld or if there’s movement between frames. Hit OK.
Go to the Layers Panel and you’ll see a new stack group. You can expand this to see all the images within. Click the small icon on the Live Stack Group. This gives you a list of blending options you can hover over to experiment with. Mean, Median and Maximum work best for blending water. First set it to Mean.
Press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E to merge a copy of all the layers into a new layer. Hide the layer for now. Go back to the stack blending menu and
