How to Blend Multiple Exposures for Car Light Trails in Photoshop

Stacking multiple exposures of a night scene lets you capture far more light trail detail than any single shot can deliver. This technique uses the Lighten blending mode to combine a bright base image with several car light trail frames, keeping only the brightest pixels from each layer for a seamless, natural result.

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Practical Tips

These key steps from the tutorial will help you get a clean, well-balanced result when blending light trail exposures.

• Use Adobe Neutral as your Camera Raw profile for the base image — it makes recovering exposure easier and gives you more headroom before clipping.
• Set each light trail layer to the Lighten blending mode so only pixels brighter than the base show through, keeping the blend looking natural.
• Mask out the sky on every light trail layer using a black brush on a layer mask — stacking multiple skies creates unnatural artifacts that are hard to fix later.
• Use the layer mask to remove incomplete light streaks — trails that start or stop abruptly on the road are distracting, so brush them out for a continuous look.
• Merge visible layers with Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E before retouching — this creates a single flat copy for spot healing without flattening your original layer stack.

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