Three things… use a Bahtinov Mask to aid in focusing on stars at night, using an intervalometer is a must (whether in-camera or externally and never use the 600, 500, 400 rule for exposure times - instead use the NPF Rule or a star tracker. Since you’re stacking images anyway, why not take multiple images of the Milky Way and stack those to help reduce noise, gradients, etc? Then use the stacked star field image with your foreground shot. And always be aware of more than the Milky Way core - Rho Ophiuchi is beautiful as a stand alone subject with a lot of color. It’s almost cropped out of your image. Plus the Milky Way core features many nebulae which glow pinking magenta to red. Having the sky so blue masks out so much of the natural color our Milky Way displays. By the way, I just purchased your Pro Panel… it’s awesome!
a year lateri came back to this video to edit a shot from last year and maaaaaaan im so happy with the results. thank you for being such an amazing soul of sharing your knowledge with us
Thanks John! I hadn't ever used the color range for the quick selection for masking and blending. I've been struggling with the mask around intricate tree lines on the horizon, so will give that a shot. Keep up the great work!
Hi John, some really nice work both in the field and then with your edit. What monitor did you have connected to your camera when shooting? I think the 500 rule is a thing of the past with today's camera sensor quality. I track and stack my sky images, then blend with blue hour foreground shots. A monitor could be handy when checking pin-point alignment etc.
Very nice video. Personally, I am trying to stay away from Photoshop because it is powerful, yet confusing. I currently use Luminar. Unfortunately, Luminar doesn't have selection tools in Photoshop. One thing you may have mentioned in previous videos was how to calculate shutter speed cropped-sensors. I know how to do that but others may not. Great video. I have made a note of that location for a future trip to Zion. The photo was amazing. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you! Yes that's true... the 500 or 400 rule I mention is for full frame. So on crop sensor a person needs to multiply their focal length times 1.5 or 1.6 before doing the calculation. Thanks for bringing that up. Also photoshop is confusing but in the end you have way more control. Just takes practice but eventually becomes second nature once you understand the tool and processes. I'm releasing an editing tool for photoshop in the near future. Be on the lookout for that :)
Thanks John, great video! Still learning the Photoshop principles and this was incredibly helpful. Would you recommend trying to shoot the foreground at blue light to reduce noise? Also would love a video about creating star trails :)
Yes I actually do. Blue hour blending is a great option combined with stacked milky way shots (I go over this in the upcoming course). Also I definitely need to do a video on star trails. Thanks for the reminder :)
Hey I usually clean up with camera raw or Nik Collection Dfine, on a separate layer. Then I can paint it in selectively with a layer mask and lower or raise the opacity of a layer to increase or decrease the strength of the effect and how much is applied.
Thanks for the tutorial. I’ve previously generated MW images using multiple exposure and stacking with Starry Landscape stacker. That helps remove objects like planes/ISS etc and also helps with noise reduction. Any reason you don’t stack multiple exposures?
Thank you!! I use Dfine which is a plugin in Nik collection, and also the noise reduction (Luminence) in Camera Raw sometimes.... more important for print than social media to me (shows up less on social apps)
You can search "milky way or Astrophotography" on Instagram and 500px, or google image etc for inspiration for locations to shoot at. But if you're in a dark sky area or find a dark sky (using a map like the one in description) then you just have to find the line up and composition for the milky way.
What an excellent tutorial! Thank you so much! The cherry on top would have been to have blending multiple exposures for noise reduction for sky and foreground. Noise also depends a lot on the gear used so this technique can help more people too. Maybe on a next one! ☺️🙏🏻 great work! Nice to see a glance on what’s behind the making of your stunning photographs. Cheers IG: dudamacs
To be clear, this tutorial missed proper color of the sky and Milky Way completely. I realize a lot of space "art" exists out there, but the night sky is anything but blue/purple - no matter how many times photographers get that wrong in post. For "digital art", its fine - just be sure to label it as such. But if you're wanting to get color correction truly right, this ain't it. clarkvision.com is an excellent resource for accurate color processing. Best of luck!
