Help! Trying to MERGE several images into one image.

I don’t even know if Photoshop has the capability of doing this, but here goes.

I have a digital rendition of a VHS video in my collection. The digital rendition is fine.
That is to say, it’s reasonably free of any recognizable digital artifacts. What it has
plenty of is VHS artifacts. Noise and other things.

Fortunately, the nature of the video in question presents a lot of opportunities to
remove much of this noise. It is a recording of a cartoon, and the cartoon was
animated at a relatively low framerate. This means that each "frame" of the cartoon
was actually recorded to the VHS video redundantly. Perhaps up to four VHS
"frames" per animation "frame". I know this to be the case because I have already
isolated a sequence of VHS "frames" as 720×480 images (deinterlaced fields) and
recognized that they are identical, with the exception of the subtle differences in
VHS noise.

What I want to do is take one of these sequences of VHS images and merge them
all together to make a single 720×480 image. For example, let’s say VHS frames
1001 to 1004 all show the exact same frame of cartoon animation. So I isolate
them as individual images, and load them into Photoshop. Now I want to merge
all four 720×480 images into a single 720×480 image.

The point, as you probably suspect by now, would be to reduce the level of VHS
noise by virtue of using the redundancy inherent in those four images which are
almost identical. As long as the frame of cartoon animation is motionless (which
it is), it should work well, and the VHS noise should be reduced by quite a bit.
I know this works, because there is a very expensive piece of software called
Visar which performs this function on video in a dynamic fashion, to achieve
pretty much the results I’m talking about (though it does a lot more).
So that’s what I’m after. I want to combine four (or more) images of the same
resolution into a single image of the same resolution. It doesn’t even have to
be Photoshop. I’d be perfectly okay (and maybe even a little happier) if there
turns out to be a way of doing this in, say, Premiere Pro, or VirtualDub. But if
there is, it’s not well-documented.

Merging images. It _can’t_ be that hard to do. But I’m having such a time
figuring out how. Help! 🙂

I’m not sure if photoshop will do that without a plugin. It is a common technique for astrophotography.
Here’s a free program that will do it:
http://astrosurf.com/buil/us/iris/iris.htm
-it’s not very user friendly though

OK here’s photoshop plugins:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=astrophotography+pl ugin
Fredas wrote:

I don’t even know if Photoshop has the capability of doing this, but here goes.

I have a digital rendition of a VHS video in my collection. The digital rendition is fine.
That is to say, it’s reasonably free of any recognizable digital artifacts. What it has
plenty of is VHS artifacts. Noise and other things.

Fortunately, the nature of the video in question presents a lot of opportunities to
remove much of this noise. It is a recording of a cartoon, and the cartoon was
animated at a relatively low framerate. This means that each "frame" of the cartoon
was actually recorded to the VHS video redundantly. Perhaps up to four VHS
"frames" per animation "frame". I know this to be the case because I have already
isolated a sequence of VHS "frames" as 720×480 images (deinterlaced fields) and
recognized that they are identical, with the exception of the subtle differences in
VHS noise.

What I want to do is take one of these sequences of VHS images and merge them
all together to make a single 720×480 image. For example, let’s say VHS frames
1001 to 1004 all show the exact same frame of cartoon animation. So I isolate
them as individual images, and load them into Photoshop. Now I want to merge
all four 720×480 images into a single 720×480 image.

The point, as you probably suspect by now, would be to reduce the level of VHS
noise by virtue of using the redundancy inherent in those four images which are
almost identical. As long as the frame of cartoon animation is motionless (which
it is), it should work well, and the VHS noise should be reduced by quite a bit.
I know this works, because there is a very expensive piece of software called
Visar which performs this function on video in a dynamic fashion, to achieve
pretty much the results I’m talking about (though it does a lot more).
So that’s what I’m after. I want to combine four (or more) images of the same
resolution into a single image of the same resolution. It doesn’t even have to
be Photoshop. I’d be perfectly okay (and maybe even a little happier) if there
turns out to be a way of doing this in, say, Premiere Pro, or VirtualDub. But if
there is, it’s not well-documented.

Merging images. It _can’t_ be that hard to do. But I’m having such a time
figuring out how. Help! 🙂