Lighten Blend Mode in Photoshop

The Lighten Blend Mode and the Sea of a Million Waves!

A few weeks ago I conducted a tutorial showing off the various Blend Modes in Photoshop, but I hesitated to get too far into the Lighten Blend Mode. The Lighten Blend Mode can be a powerful asset in photo post processing. Most people use it to create the star trail paths that look like giant circles in the sky. In many cases those images are created from a series of long exposures not one photo. Let's look at what Adobe says about the Lighten Blend Mode.

Adobe describes the Lighten Blend Mode accordingly:

Lighten: Looks at the color information in each channel and selects the base or blend color—whichever is lighter—as the result color. Pixels darker than the blend color are replaced, and pixels lighter than the blend color do not change.

What does that mean in Lehman's Terms?

In it's most basic principle it means any layer you set to Lighten will vanish unless the pixels contained in a given area are lighter than the layer you are placing it on.

I took White and Black and painted them on a photo. I then set that layer's blend mode to Lighten. The result shows that all of the Black vanishes and only the pixels that are lighter than the underlying layer staying.

So how would you use this in practical application?

In today's demonstration I will show how 9 photos of the ocean waves can be stacked on top of one another to look like a much more violent sea.