Blender Single Composite Image (lighten)

Updated September 2017 (screenshots are from Blender 2.78)

This page covers the simple steps needed to make this happen. Yes, there is a Blender doc for compositing,but it took me most of a day to figure it out (I am completely new to Blender, so it's all a bit overwhelming, and nothing is intuitive). Of course one can do this really easily in GIMP or Photoshop, but the goal is to move into whole movie clips and more sophisticated batch processing.

1. Open Blender

2. Choose "Compositing" as your main view (to the right of Help):

3. Click on Use Nodes and Backdrop; the first 2 nodes will appear automatically:

4.Cut the link by clicking Node then choosing "Cut Links" and mousing over the link and left-clicking:

5.Click Add -> Input -> Image for each of your inputs, then click Add -> Color -> Mix:

6. Attach (drag the mouse) from each image yellow dot to an image spot on the Mix node. Checkbox Clamp (so that maximum brightness is 1), and click "Mix" dropdown to choose "Lighten":

7. Click Add -> Output -> Viewer;

8. and click the mix node yellow dot to the yellow image dot on the Viewer node:

9. Go to the bottom of the frame and click the Browse Image icon, choose "Viewer Node"

Then scroll out (finger towards you), to see the whole image.

Here is the final screenshot:

10. Finally (oof), Click on the bottom menu Image -> Save As, and choose your file type/location:

11. SAVE AS !!! This way the next time you want to do something simple to mix two images, you can call this up, load in the new images (click on their drop-downs) and it will re-render in seconds.