Shame about the comms cables!!
I don’t see many thunderstorms. So I got the camera up on the windowsill and took 62 30-second exposures. Some of these had forked lightning! And some of these were at the same angle, so I decided to composite them together in Darktable. I did get some very nice single images, but this is an experiment
Some noise was reduced, some banding and other artefacts showed up. But you can indeed recursively composite 8 images!
The first one is 5 images together. It went quite smoothly. the second is 2 images, the fourth is 2 images, and the third is 8 images. That one was much more difficult. It needed different amounts of exposure and tone equaliser between each image, and different blending settings on Composite instances.
Thinking about it now, I could have just used 7 instances of Composite on the final image instead? That’s probably the better way to do this. That’s what we can all learn from this one 
It’s also great for experimenting with colours. Mostly stuck with the purple/blue for these though.
Some are downscaled by half; the remaining noise probably made the filesize quite high.
Nice thanks for sharing :-). Capturing something like this and playing with the results is always fun.
Did you mask the different captures with the composite module or did you use some clever blending mode trickery?
Nice! I was just wondering about the use of composite for a similar purpose last weekend! My past experiments have been with GIMP and PS, but I was curious what might be better/different when using dt.
What timely motivation!
Thankyou! Most of them are done with addition blend mode in RGB (scene) mode. I decided addition because it’s a bright thing on a dark background.
There is one drawn mask for one of the set of 8, because it was a tiny bolt in the corner, and I was getting some bad colour artefacts when adding the whole image. No drawn/parametric masks otherwise. Another one in that sequence uses lightness blend mode with about 50% opacity, because that eliminated some similar colour artefacts.
Thankyou too! I’m glad to hear it’s inspiring.
I wonder if this is not something where GIMP is the better tool. But I just tried doing multiple composites in DT using the composite module and that certainly does allow multiple instances of the module. So maybe DT could handle the job.
It probably is a job for a pixel pusher, but since dt accomplishes some tasks very differently it is something I am curious to play with. Worst case…I spend a day having fun without any real product/output worth keeping!