Basic Photoshop Milky Way Stacking & Blending Tutorial 

Good luck David! Hopefully it helped out!

Thank you, Kahfi!

Thanks so much, Aim!

Hey Stefano, thank you! So I had to go back and watch the tutorial again and it looks like at this point in the edit I have my sky as the front layer and the foreground as my back layer (a bit opposite of what I may do now, but still not a problem). Basically I made a selection of my foreground and added a layer mask to my sky. Because when the mask was added it exposed the foreground first, I hit Command + i (Control + i on a PC) and it inverted the mask, showing the stacked sky and the properly exposed foreground. Make sense?

also, was wondering why median and not the other stack mode options? and why does this option get rid of soo many stars?

Hey Clayton! So the issue is moire and it predominantly occurs when stacking high ISO, low light images. There are other instances where fabric patterns cause it too, but for this image its obviously a landscape issue. The reason I was able to apply the lens correction and avoid the moire issues in the foreground is because I took those long exposure foreground shots as well. It doesn't always work out perfectly, fortunately I was able to recover this image. Beyond this explanation I don't really know a heck of a lot about what causes moire. Here is an article i came across that has a bit of information: starcircleacademy.com/tag/moire/

stevenjmagner Okay good to know. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you, Art! So I have a few methods to blending my milky way skies with my foreground. In fact this particular shot I blended in a blue hour foreground with a pano milky way as well. This high iso blend was the same night and I was really just testing out the noise handling of the Mark 4. Here's a dropbox link to the stacked image above: www.dropbox.com/s/j5933ycmzcoh9yw/easternsierras_marshlake_6_12_18-1.jpg?dl=0

Thanks! That is a very nice shot. Your work on the foreground is amazing.

@@ArtHeld Thank you, Art! Here is my version with blue hour blending as well: www.dropbox.com/s/elafacleprq1tkn/easternsierras_marshlake_6_13_18-1-2.jpg?dl=0

@@stevenjmagner - whoa! That is amazing! It is almost other-worldly. The added detail and contrast in both the trees and the mountains is great! Did you leave the camera unmoved between shots? Or just position it close to the same location?

​@@ArtHeld the foreground was shot at the same time of this video. Once I was done taking images for this video, I put another lens on and did a quick pano stitch for the milky way that appears in this image. This was at prime time milky way season this year and I had a lot of time to play with settings and techniques!

I use Starry Landscape Stacker to do just that. I own a tracker but haven't used it in years. I have tutorials on both using Photoshop to manually stack exposures as well as using Starry Landscape Stacker. If you are on PC, Sequator is another option for stacking images.

@@stevenjmagner Thanks. Will definitely look into it.

The mirror is not 2x smaller, and the mirror has little to do with it. Your Canon T6i is a crop sensor camera, if you put in a lens designed for full frame cameras, the sensor in your camera, which is smaller, will crop the image by a factor of 1.6. So, effectively, your 18-125 will be the equivalent of a 28.8 - 200 in a full frame body. The mirror just reflects the image coming through the lens so you can see it in the viewfinder. Though not ideal, you can still use your camera to shoot night sky photos but you won’t be able to at such low ISO values as 200. The stars the author uses in this video were shot at 12500 ISO. If you use a shutter speed of 30 seconds with your lens, you will also capture some star trailing. To avoid that, you can use the 500 rule, in which you divide 500 by the focal length of your lens and it gives you the maximum time in seconds that you can leave your shutter open to avoid star trailing. So let’s do some math: 18mm x 1.6 (crop factor) is 28.8 and 500 divided by 28.8 is 17.36, which means your slowest shutter speed should be no more than 17 seconds.

Hey Bikram. These variables change depending on focal length, foreground lighting, moon phase, light pollution, et al. A good start (but not a rule) is to divide your focal length by 500 and that is how long your shutter speed should be open. The more you shoot the more you will realize that there are slight star trails and there is another measurement out there that is more precise to fix this. For foregrounds, I will usually (assuming there is no moon and no foreground lighting) shoot a 4 minute long expo around 800 ISO and f/4. I will take 2-3 exposures of this and stack them in photoshop.

@@stevenjmagner I think you mean divide 500 by your focal length.

@@oirvine yep, thank you for the correction!

The noise from high ISO is random, so you'll have a different pattern of noise for each photo you shot. The median blend mode takes advantage of this phenomenon to eliminate the noise itself. If you try to duplicate the very same image 10 times and belnd them in PS, nothing will happen because the lack of differences in the photos.

@@mattiaferraboli5715 i see, thank you

Did you try it? It's actually the aurora sky replacement hotkey!

This comment is akin to me going on your channel and saying "That's why I like dogs. Owning a cat isn't much different that not owning a cat, and they only show up when they want something." Does that mean you're going to stop producing cat videos just because I don't like them?

@@stevenjmagner More post production = less photo in photo, that's all ;) It's not about you, but about today's photography. In my opinion, when someone will achieve good photo/final effect in more simple way, then he's better photographer - in the traditional sense of the word.

@@bobonikita Photography is an art. When people start imposing "rules" on it - it stops becoming art. Anyway, this video is for removing the noise that doesn't exist naturally so you shouldn't be disappointed.

@@bobonikita It's a bit hard to capture a deep space object in a single click...

@@bobonikita It might be an opinion, but there's no need to bash on the other because of it. Don't want the post production? Then go to a dark sky reserve, with a very fast lens and a star tracker to get over 1 hour of exposure at low noise level and the hope that in that hour nothing bad happens. Cost of that? Perhaps a couple thousands of dollars, at least! Photoshop? Pretty cheap over all. Same result, different methods. Discussion's over.

The masks are there so the foreground doesn't confuse the auto-align tool. Remember the stars are moving, the ground is not.

Tegan Mann hello

FUCK OFF

ISO is not an acronym but rather a word to describe the international organization of standards, so it is actually "eyeso".