Combining Fireworks
July 5th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
The above picture is composed from a array of seven captures of fireworks taken at Columbus, Indiana on July2nd, 2010.
Having seen similar images with an array of fireworks, but never having actually witnessed such a spectacle, I decided to try to create the effect by myself on GIMP.
I had a set of images of fireworks (used seven of those here), all decent looking but nothing outstanding. Initially I cropped all the images down only to the useful section (read light streaks). The background was nearly black for all the images but had a slight tint of the color of the fireworks due to the smoke surrounding the fireworks. This tint would have made it obvious that individual images were added to form one big image. Hence to remove this tint, I did a bucket fill of black for the entire background, creating a uniform background for all the images.
I created a new image in GIMP with a black color and followed it with a random arrangement of the seven individual fireworks images, each on a separate layer. I decided to cut-off parts of two of the images to give it a more realistic feel 
Following this operation I had eight layers, and changed the layer mode to addition to get the brightest parts of each image, which gave me a beautiful collage of fireworks. Flattened the image and added my watermark and saved the image.
A fairly simple process with great results!
