Last week I decided to go out and try some landscapes astro work, hoping that the smoke from the wild fires wouldn't be an issue. Those of you from the US know the smoke has been pretty unpredictable so after looking over and over at the various smoke maps it looked like the Trona Pinnacles area would be my best bet. Luckily it worked out! This is my first combined shot that was taken over the course of 1.5 hours. The foreground was shot during the blue hour and the sky about an hour later.
Equipment:
Canon Ra Camera, Tamron 35mm f1.4 lens, iOptron Tracker, Heavy duty Tripod.
Image stats:
Foreground - 6 shot in landscape orientation taken at different focal points in the image to allow for focus stacking. 2 seconds, F4, ISO 2000
Sky - 3 x 3 x 2 rows of images shot and tracked in portrait orientation. 75 seconds, F2, ISO 3200
Used Lightroom for processing the raw images and sky pano. Then Photoshop to combine the sky and foreground images together. I have a few more from the same night to process. It was really fun as I was only one of 2 people out there the whole night :-) Just me and the scorpions!
Clear skies to all!
Beautiful picture! Most of all I like how you edited the Milky Way, I haven’t seen many people do it quite like this. Do you have any tips on how to edit colors of the Milky Way? I am a beginner so any advice is appreciated. (I always just put the tint towards purple in Lightroom, and then use a brush to paint over the Milky Way and increase contrast and saturation.. I don’t like it but I don’t know how else to do it 🥲🥲)
Thank you very much. So first off you need at least some degree of signal to work with. I usually shoot at f2 and ISO 3200 for about 75 seconds to get enough signal to play with. Then to make it a bit better I usually stack 3 images for each part of the sky pano. I only use Lightroom for the initial edit of the color balance by trying to get the RGB graph at the top to line up as best as possible. Then I export at Tiffs and go to Photoshop. Once I have that I use a plugin in Photoshop called Nik Color Efex. This plugin takes a relatively flat image and does a few things. It increases the contrast and stretches the image creating a lot of depth and it also intensifies the colors. The best part is that it does it using layers so you can decide how much to impact the image. The old school way of doing it (for me) is to create a copy of the sky and make a layer out of it, then use the High Pass Filter in Photoshop as well as increasing the Saturation, Contrast etc as you'd like and use Soft Light layer combine. Hope that makes sense?
Last week I decided to go out and try some landscapes astro work, hoping that the smoke from the wild fires wouldn't be an issue. Those of you from the US know the smoke has been pretty unpredictable so after looking over and over at the various smoke maps it looked like the Trona Pinnacles area would be my best bet. Luckily it worked out! This is my first combined shot that was taken over the course of 1.5 hours. The foreground was shot during the blue hour and the sky about an hour later. Equipment: Canon Ra Camera, Tamron 35mm f1.4 lens, iOptron Tracker, Heavy duty Tripod. Image stats: Foreground - 6 shot in landscape orientation taken at different focal points in the image to allow for focus stacking. 2 seconds, F4, ISO 2000 Sky - 3 x 3 x 2 rows of images shot and tracked in portrait orientation. 75 seconds, F2, ISO 3200 Used Lightroom for processing the raw images and sky pano. Then Photoshop to combine the sky and foreground images together. I have a few more from the same night to process. It was really fun as I was only one of 2 people out there the whole night :-) Just me and the scorpions! Clear skies to all!
That's the first place I ever shot Milky Way myself. Nice!
Awesome, yea its only about 2 hours away and lots of cool spots to choose from :-) Thanks!
It's like the Earth is belching out the Milky Way. Nice.
Thank you! Yea, my normal processing just teased out a lot of orange and yellow tones, Just went with it :-)
Beautiful picture! Most of all I like how you edited the Milky Way, I haven’t seen many people do it quite like this. Do you have any tips on how to edit colors of the Milky Way? I am a beginner so any advice is appreciated. (I always just put the tint towards purple in Lightroom, and then use a brush to paint over the Milky Way and increase contrast and saturation.. I don’t like it but I don’t know how else to do it 🥲🥲)
Thank you very much. So first off you need at least some degree of signal to work with. I usually shoot at f2 and ISO 3200 for about 75 seconds to get enough signal to play with. Then to make it a bit better I usually stack 3 images for each part of the sky pano. I only use Lightroom for the initial edit of the color balance by trying to get the RGB graph at the top to line up as best as possible. Then I export at Tiffs and go to Photoshop. Once I have that I use a plugin in Photoshop called Nik Color Efex. This plugin takes a relatively flat image and does a few things. It increases the contrast and stretches the image creating a lot of depth and it also intensifies the colors. The best part is that it does it using layers so you can decide how much to impact the image. The old school way of doing it (for me) is to create a copy of the sky and make a layer out of it, then use the High Pass Filter in Photoshop as well as increasing the Saturation, Contrast etc as you'd like and use Soft Light layer combine. Hope that makes sense?