Trevor, you have a big place in my heart. I've been interested in astronomy since I was a kid, like 4 or 5 yrs old. My parents bought me my first scope back when I was 10, some very cheap one, and I saw everything it could show me. You can not imagine how happy I was when I finally found M57 after about a hour trying to find it. : D Since this hobby is quite expensive, especially when you do not have any kind of income, I quit long time ago. About a month (or two) ago I saw your video in recommendations and man. Mount (HEQ5 Pro) has arrived at tuesday, scope and camera will arrive next week. I AM BACK! Because of school (school environment to be exact) I was not very happy person, very pessimistic. Last night I spent all night with my old scope and new mount under the stars. I was not so happy and calmed since I was little kid. It's only a little newton 114/900 but it can show some stuff! I owe you a big BIG thank you man! If only I could meet you someday and say it to you personally (that will probably never happen, because I am from Europe). Clear skies!
Thanks for this. I have been trying astrophotography, for a while now, and I didn't have a telescope whatsoever. The best I had was a 75-300 mm lens with an aperture of 5.6. I decided it was time for me to be able to move to landscape photography, and oh my word, I found my passion. I had a lens that was pretty bad and a really bad tripod, and I just couldn't jam a good photo in. Anywhere. So I got a lens with an aperture of 2.8 and a focal length of 24 mm and I have had the time of my life with it. I was a natural. You were the startup of this passion. I needed a way to find out how to edit the Milky Way, like right now. And then pops this video. I was early so I wrote this comment, but I hope that you see it, and I just want to say thanks. I've had a rough time right now and astrophotography has helped a lot.
Thank you for acknowledging me! I hope one day to go to a star meet as well, but I am currently limited by age and distance. But I hope to meet you, and I hope that you grow as well as I.
You sound like me. Amazing the difference a lense can make, huh. I have the 24mm lense like yours. My next purchase...dream lense is a 400mm 2.8 aperature.
I always focus more on the foreground and light painting but is time to level up my Milky Way processing from intermediate to advanced. Yours is one of the bests I found on RU-vid. Many thanks.
I was watching mainly for Photoshop tips on my DSS photos and wasn't all at that interested in doing a wide angle Milky Way shot, but your video and end result just changed my mind.
I'm new to astrophotography and a big Adobe product user. Thank you for this I just bought my first star tracker and I was wondering about how to edit photos once I have them. This was a great tutorial. I will continue to follow your work.
Great tutorial and video. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. It's really amazing the ability that nowadays we have to learn so much stuff by just watching youtube videos. Easy to watch, fast to understand and free. Big thanks once again for sharing.
Purchased the Astronomy Tools Action set as a result of this video and others I've seen you and others using it before. Sitting here right now processing (some of these actions take forever but the results are amazing).
Wow, what a great video. I am a semi pro photographer for the last 20 years. While my mainstays have been action, wildlife and sporting dogs, I have dabbled into night sky photos. Now that I am getting closer to retirement, one of my top goals is exploring astrophotography and astronomy in general. This was a great tutorial into what goes into making the camera capture and transforming it to what they or mind really Sees! I have saved this and will try some of the PS work on the Milky Way I shot, for practice. Great work, great explanation, and greatly appreciated! Well done!
Clear explanation and a pleasant way of editing. I like that. I am still new to Astrophotography, but with your skilled films I can understand everything a lot better. I have a lot of it! Thanks ..
Excellent tutorial. I've just recently tried my hand at capturing the Milkyway. The southern arc of the Milkyway is directly over a number of large cities so light pollution is high.
As always Trevor, great work. I always learn a lot from each video. You have convinced me I need to break down and buy the astronomy tools action set. I feel it is really what is holding me back at this point.
That cooling filter was amazing! You should realy consider entering the image and some of your others into the astronomy photographer of the year competition. It would stand a really good chance!
You showed me the individual images you gathered for this at Cherry Springs. The final image looks awesome, seeing your work is inspirational! I'm planning to take another trip out there sometime next week, as close to the new moon as weather permits.
Thank you so much for this Trevor. I definitely learn better the way you taught this. I'm a visual and tactile learner, but also like to know the why to what is done. As you said, it allows for creativeness, instead of being cookie-cutter
Trevor, thanks for the video. Great image! I completely agree with your comments regarding processing style and understanding why various processing steps are done, rather than following a ‘recipe’ by rote. One nit, I believe flats are used for correcting uneven illumination in the optical system. For example, vignetting and even dust spots on the sensor. Flats won’t help with gradients caused by light pollution. Keep up the great work on AstroBackyard.
Thanks T! This really helps in getting a general idea of a workflow. I don’t have Photoshop but the flow I believe is similar to other freeware like Gimp. It’s been raining for 3 weeks here in Seattle so no night sky to photograph. It’s a good time to learn editing while indoors.
Easily one of my go-to videos for editing stills. Just wish I could more easily apply this process to my timelapses! Thanks for putting this together. Great teaching method. Bonus points for soundtrack choice.
You are truly an amazing astrophotographer. I'm 56 years old, with a 9 year old son. I dream that he will be as interested in the night sky, astronomy, and astrophotography as I am when he is older. I try to involve him in the beauty of the night sky, as much as possible. In fact, were going out to the McDonald Observatory, in the Davis Mountains in West Texas, this weekend. It will be his first trip out to a truly dark sky site (we live on the border of a bortle class 7/8-9 zone). I hope he is as mesmerized by the brilliance of the stars as I was at his age. I know you recently lost your father, for that I'm deeply saddened. I know he was a big part of your life, and your biggest fan. I hope I can be that for my son as well. Thank you for all you do, and all you share with us on youtube.
Thank you for all the information you provide. I am waiting for my first purchase of a refractor telescope. I have interest with astrophotography. I have no photoshop background and want to reduce my out of pocket until I can figure out if my future is just visual or imagery. Please let me know what program you would suggest for a newbie. You are awesome...
Awesome video as always. I don't have any AP gear yet, but hoping in the next month or so I'll be starting this new hobby. Until then, I keep watching and learning as much as I can, and your videos are really informative. As for someone who's never used PS before, have you ever thought about sharing some data, and then making a PS tutorial for beginners to use the same data and follow along with you while they go. I would be even good with paying for the data and tutorial just to learn. Great job, and keep up the awesome work.
I have some photos I took last November from a dark sky site in West Texas. I'll follow your suggestions and compare to what I have. Thanks for the video.
OK, you are using stack photos which I didn't take. Completely different animal then. I tried to run my single frames through your method. I find Photoshop a bit overwhelming. It isn't intuitive. Watching your tutorial, I have to pause, take notes and try to replicate what you're doing. I gave it a couple of hours of that and got tired of it. My picture was looking horrible, while your's was improving. So, to sum it up, I have a very steep learning curve. Learning to take quality astrophotos and learning Photoshop. Thanks for what you do.
Hey Trevor, I keep coming back to this video not only for the beautiful tutorial which I salute you for but also for the music. Would you mind sharing the name of this track please? I've listened to all Aljosha Konstanty discography and I can't find it.
A few of your videos popped up as recommendations so I checked them out. This one was great and really makes me wish I had found this before we had our trip to the upper part of Michigan. There ended up being a dark park 20 minutes from us and it was amazing. I brought two cameras with me, a Nikon D90 which I think is 12.5mp the other is my 42mp Sony a7rii. Took a few shots with my Nikon then switched to my Sony. When I got back home in Maryland that's when I found out the Sony suffers from something called star eater on photos longer than 5 seconds. So it sounds like my 20 second shots have some stars missing from them. Watching this video though makes me want to get a star tracker and a wider lens for my Nikon and find a dark park near me. Really sucks my Sony with its massive sensor can't be used.
Can you use other imaging editing software to process your stacked images. I don't have Photoshop (too expensive), I use Affinity Photo 2 for any image editing?
Really nice edit! I'm used to doing single exposures of approximately 30 seconds on a 14mm f/2.8 rokinon which works well in some cases but it's amazing how much detail you're grabbing on a T3i when tracking and stacking. I'm going to have to give this a shot. (pun intended)
Couple questions, one I didn't use the same filter as you did. I used the Astronomik CLS CCD clip in filter. Will that filter do well with milky way photos? And when you are shooting your photos, do you turn off your LCD screen on your T3I? Thank you for the help.
Absolutely love the tutorial and your work.... I am a new subscriber and also have a huge passion for Astro Photography.... Do you have a link to the Photoshop tools panel you are using in this Video? Is it available to purchase anywhere? Thanks again and I look forward to your next video.. 👌
Trevor, I am new to astrophotography and have just started photo sessions using my Ioptron CEM25P and Canon T3i DSLR, but admittedly I am weak when it comes to post-processing. I managed to follow your tutorial on Stacker and have prepared my stacked photo but am stuck with the notion of paying a subscription fee to Adobe for Photoshop use. I see you can buy Photoshop elements for a reasonable price sans subscription. Can I get by with Photoshop elements for now while I see if I like astrophotography? Are all your tutorials/ tools used based on the full PS subscription version only? Robert
To line things in photoshop : paste, invert, 50% opacity, transform until you get almost uniform grey. Eventually 2x resolution then half to gain in accuracy. I agree about everything but the last denoise which look to me that is just a blur. Your colors looks realistic to me like that one night far in the middle of the ocean where there was really no light pollution, except in reality there is less saturation, but when you cooled down the thing THERE it's the right colors. This is a great tutorial : we should always include taste and allow variations from context, intent, situation.
I love your channel! Whether or not you're sponsored, you don't present yourself as the heavily sponsored photographer where dropping $20,000 on a lens/telescope isn't a big deal and help those of us, like myself, who are just every day people with a day job feel like we can do this too! Side question, was that Skyrim music during the tutorial?
Hi Trevor! Sorry for commenting on such an old post, but I can't for the life of me figure out the answer to this question.. I see that you stack tracked images, but I thought the tracker was a way to do single exposures with good SNR..? Will this give a better result then a single long exposure with etc ISO 400..? I bought a tracker for this reason, but now Im afraid to do single exposure and miss out on detail. A little confusing 😅
Great video Trevor! just a quick question. Do you do anything drastically different from what you showed us in this video to when you process an image of a deep sky object, or is it basically the same?
thank you for this great tutorial. quick question. If the light frame is, for example, of 2 mins expose, does the dark frame need to be of that long exposure?
Is there a comparable operation in GIMP for selecting the dark color and lighter color when editing the curve? Would be really useful since I have to do the operation by eye and can't afford Photoshop
Trevor, hi. I'm not understanding why my photos a take of the milky way never look like yours out of the camera or stacked in DSS. I have the T3I, Rokinon 14mm.
I have a question, do you apply lens correction? because if you apply correction to light frames (in lightroom) before stack them, I think that dark frames need lens correction too.
Quick question: If you have used JPEG at 100% quality instead of TIFF. Would you get the same result in Photoshop or would it actually make any visible difference? Thank you in advance.
Cool! Exactly what i needed, thanks for the video. I noticed you said that you sort the pictures with satellites and planes out, i leave them in because deep sky stacker edites the trails out automaticly. I'm not sure but i think it's the median filter who does that. Mabey you can check it out the next time you edit with deep sky stacker, i'm pretty sure!
And in case of your monitor, photography editing is usually at 120 nits. I calibrate my monitor for the correct colour and brightness with the "spyder 5". When i print my pictures now they look the same as on the monitor. Greetings from Germany
such an amazing video Trevor, thanks for all your hard work. i just started playing around with a telescope but im getting frustrated because everything i look at doesn't have any detail at all, all i see is blue-ish dim balls of light and its very discouraging:(
