Arsenal’s Long Exposure Stacking will simulate the look of a very long exposure by stacking multiple shorter exposures. This technique is often used by landscape photographers to smooth out waves in the water and/or to blur the clouds. The advantages are avoiding sensor noise during long exposures and helping to avoid camera shake.

Before shooting, always make sure that:

Set the Arsenal app to either Smart or Manual mode. If you want Arsenal to choose all of the settings, tap “Smart” or if you prefer to control the ISO, aperture, shutter or EV tap “Manual.”

Tap the Option button with the stacking/blending options to the left of the shutter button.
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On the Stacking/Blending screen, tap on “Long Exposure Stacking”

Use the slider to set the number of images for the exposure stack.

Note: To achieve longer exposure times for each shot set your aperture to a larger f/number (F8 or higher). This will increase the shutter speed time adding a more flowing look to a water or moving shots.

When composing the scene, take into consideration which parts of the scene you want to remain stationary and which parts you want to show motion or blur. Shooting in the golden hours often produces softer, more pleasing light than the midday sun.

Swipe down on the Long Exposure Stacking settings screen when done to return to the main screen. To begin taking the long exposure stack, tap the circular shutter button.

When Arsenal is finished processing the stacked image, a thumbnail preview will appear in the lower right corner of the app. You can identify the completed stacked image by the Long Exposure icon that appears in the lower-left corner of the thumbnail. Tap the thumbnail to see a larger version. Click the share button to save or share your completed stacked image. To save your stacked merged photo to your phone automatically, navigate to the Settings screen and turn on the “Save to Phone” feature and select “Stacks”.

​Please note: The completed stacked image that Arsenal creates is cached in temp storage and displayed in the Arsenal Gallery in the app. We recommend automatically saving stacks to your phone or sharing/saving the image from the Arsenal gallery once the stack has been completed.