That was amazing tutorial from start to end. Especially the stitching part where you told not to shot more than 4 or 5 images with longer shutter speeds. I am definitely gonna try this technique out on 28th of March under Bortle 2 sky site with Z6.
SAY WHATTTT!!! Damn Steve what have you been waiting for LOL ;) ... Hey man I'm going to be in Cali from June 1st to the 5th if you want to meet up shoot. I'm going to Alabama hills and Bristolcone Pine Forest (weather permitting).
Michael S thanks for watching!! I challenged myself to post weekly for 2019. It’s a bit of a struggle to find time and create content but so far so good! Cheers 🍻
Great video Mike. I love watching your videos. It's helped me improve my Milkyway time lapses.i used your colour correction method on my latest milky way lightning storm video time lapse
James C that’s weird... my test results seemed to created very similar results to Starry Landscape Stacker. What are you exposure settings? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-C-MCvbYj-hA.html
Hey Mike - I really enjoyed watching this and learnt quite a bit...thank you. As you said, a lot of the editing of the actual milky way is personal preference, but do you perhaps have a video on general editing of the milky way core itself?....just so i can get a base to start from.... Thanks again
In some of my other tutorials I do some editing.... But typically I do an S Curve, then I take a dodging brush and dodge the highlights of the milky way and burn the shadows of the darker parts of the milky way. Thats pretty much it since I keep my MW relatively natural compared to other photographers.
at 12:30, the purple/magenta area you painted out is actually a really large Hydrogen Alpha area that should be reddish magenta. Not sure if you already knew that or not. here's an example of it: www.narrowbandimaging.com/images/south_milky_way_35mm_6303_HaRGB_xga.jpg
Hi Mike, thanks for all the super useful information of this video, also for the blending. Do you take also tracked panoramas? It would be great a video about that.
Yes I've done them before... They can be a little tricky and hard to stitch together but I am trying to find the best / easiest way to do one. I will make a video in the near future on how I do them! Thanks for watching.
I leave it in auto since I am shooting in raw and then adjust it in post. If you set your white balance, do it at the location since it will vary depending on the ambient light from light pollution in the area.
If you want sharper stars using a shorter shutter speed. You can lower the ISO but then you would need to take longer exposures or have a really fast lens like 1.8
My problem when I try to take panoramas of the sky is that each shot is darker at the edges, so the finished panorama has dark vertical bands that ruin the shot. How can I avoid this when shooting, or fix it afterwards?
What lens are you using? I get that issue as well sometimes. It tends to happen when I use my 20mm 1.8s lens and not so much when I use my old 14 - 24 2.8. What you can try to do to fix that is to have more overlap. So if you are rotating at 15 degree increments then try 10 degrees instead. Also before you combine the images into a panorama try manually removing the vignette first. Hopefully that will mitigate the issue.
So for landscapes only, I will still stack in photoshop. For example, the (4x) 30 second exposure foregrounds that I shot in this tutorial, I stacked in PS and then brought the stacks back into lightroom since I knew I wasn't using their sky and I didn't need to track it. If you are blending a different foreground with your sky image then definitely stack that foreground in PS... Now if you are talking about the photoshop stacking method in which you have to manually align the stars for each picture to mimic SLS or Sequator, then absolutely SLS and Sequator are much better than trying to manually align your stars in photoshop to stack. Lonely Spec tutorial for the (old) PS stacking method. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-zzVSm64zq44.html Tracking and stacking in PS was more tedious and a method used before SLS / Sequator was available. Hope this made sense...
Thank you! You can, but for this tutorial I did not use any tracking device. I have a video I am hopefully coming out soon with with regards to tracking panos.
Hey Mike, I have seen this video a few times now, but I have one question that you may be able to help me with. I am guessing that it is better to shoot the arch in a pano at the beginning of the Milky Way window, say March/April because it is lower in the sky. Would you agree? By my experience, the Milky Way moves into a vertical position as the year progresses and so it will become difficult to capture the whole thing.
March, April, May and probably June (before it drifts up to high). You can do it as it gets higher in the sky but it does get more complex and harder for stitching software to stitch accurately. I like to do it in those 4 months so I'm only doing a single row panorama with my 14mm lens in portrait orientation with 15 degree rotations to give me plenty of overlap. I've done 2 row panoramas when it has gotten higher up, but Lightroom struggled to stitch it. I had to use PTGui instead which helped but still a time consuming process.
lez76 when I upload a 4K video it takes about an hour for the HD and 4K option to become available. (Sometimes even longer). Sorry for the inconvenience... I’m trying to find a work around for future video releases. Take care
Great video mike! Is it ok to wait until the camera as process the 5 images before moving to the other part of the pano or there's a way to go faster? I'm talking about the ''long exposure noise reduction'' time. Thanks man!
Loïc Dupuis Thanks! I’m not exactly sure I understand your question.. I want to say yes, if you are capturing your foreground separate from your sky. Can you clarify?
Thanks for your reply! I’ll try to clarify. I’m shooting with the Sony A7rii and I don’t know if it’s the same for all cameras but after each of my shots (or series of shots) I have to wait for the « long exposure noise reduction » process to finish. For example if I take a 15 seconds picture my camera process the image for 15 seconds afterwards. My question is : Do you also wait for that processing to finish or you’re bypassing that in any ways that I’m missing? Couldn’t find a lot of informations on that subject on the web! Thanks Mike.
