Stacking is a method in photoshop which allows you to import a set of images and apply certain rules to them. It’s used by night photographers to map star trails, and can also be used to remove moving pixels from photos – allowing you to create ghostly deserted images of places that are usually packed like Trafalgar Square. I’ve been playing around with each stack method on my timelapse image set from Kyoto and posted the results below for your enjoyment!
Original
Just for comparison, here is one of the original frames that went into the stack. Also, some of the images below are 100% white, you aren’t seeing anything wrong!
Mode 1 – Entropy
Mode 2 – Kurtosis
Mode 3 – Maximum
Mode 4 – Mean
Mode 5 – Median
Mode 6 – Minimum
Mode 7 – Range
Mode 8 – Skewness
Mode 9 – Standard-deviation
Mode 10 – Summation
Mode 11 – Variance
So some came out really great, and some not so much. I really like all the unintentional effects some of the modes create, for instance the double-image effect in maximum mode caused by the tripod slowly sagging during the shoot. I look forward to shooting specifically to experiment more with stacking in the future!