Happy Birthday America

Happy Birthday America 249! To create this composite, I photographed the Statue of Liberty against a night sky and the fireworks bursts, also, were captured against a dark sky. In Photoshop, I then selected a fireworks image -- the entire frame [Select > all] -- and pasted it [Edit > paste] into the image of the statue. Then, I chose the 'lighten' blend mode within the layers palette, and that made the black sky background disappear all around the fireworks. I then sized the fireworks [Edit > transform > scale] and moved it into place with the move tool. I repeated this process for each burst of fireworks. It was not necessary to make precise selections to put this together.