Astrophotography Post Processing Tutorial // Twilight blend with Light Painting

this video is brought to you by squarespace so in my last in the field video i put together an astrophotography image that was composed of four different images there's a couple light painted frames in there there was a long exposure for the shadow information and then one image for the sky and as a result there was a lot of questions that came in about how i went about putting that photo together so i figured it would make a good video so that's what this video is let's do it so that image was composed of this frame which is a long exposure it's a three minute long exposure at iso 800 this frame which is a faster exposure taken for the sky and then this exposure for a little bit of light painting and dimensionality to the light that was hitting the school house and then this image where essentially we're just going to use a little bit of the light painting from inside the doorway so the first thing that we need to do and the first thing that i do to most of the images i edit is i open them up as a smart object inside of photoshop smart object is nothing more than opening it up inside of photoshop where you still have access to the raw file it's always the best way to do it if you can get away with it so all i'm going to do is select the first image hold down shift select on the fourth image so they're all four selected right click go up to edit in open a smart object in photoshop now when i do this the unfortunate thing is that photoshop doesn't have a way of automatically opening them opening them up as layers in the same file so we're going to have to put them into the same file it's pretty easy to do though so now if we look here inside of photoshop we have four different files open that's each one of these images now the the manual way to do this is i could just hold down shift grab the move tool hold down shift click on the thumbnail and drag it to whatever file we want to work from and then let go so that brings it into this file here you can see that there are still smart objects because we have that little icon in the bottom right corner of the thumbnail so we would have to do this for all four of the images bring it over drop it grab this one bring it over and drop it so now they're all in the same file or another way of doing that for those of you that have lumensia if we go back a few steps here i could get open up lumensia click on the pre-blend button then it brings up this dialog box where essentially i could have it align things i could check the alignment but in this case all we want to do is add black masks and then hit blend documents and also you can select whether you have the darkest on top or what not doesn't really matter for this image but it's useful in an exposure blending type situation so if i hit the blend documents it's going to essentially do the exact same thing only it's going to give us black layer masks as well which will be pretty useful to start off with black layer mask so those of you that have lumensia it's pretty easy now if i disable these layer masks we have light painted frame number two on top light frame light painted frame number one and then we have sky image and we have foreground image so the first thing that we need to do is i want to go in and i want to make things um make things match a little bit you see the if we look at the white balance between this image and our sky frame you can see how much more blue tone there is in this long exposure we need to kind of tone that down or else they're not going to look very natural when we blend them together also the entire point of this frame is to have nice clean shadows so i want to make sure that we're maintaining that shadow information we don't want it to get too contrasty while on the other hand we want a lot of contrast in our sky frame to really bring out that milky way to make the stars pop first thing i want to do is we'll double click on this base layer this is our long exposure frame and now that's going to bring up adobe camera because this is a smart object so i'm going to go in first things first let's try to get our white balance a little bit more neutral somewhere in here looks good also in the video i mentioned that we had a lot of red light pollution back here in this background this is something that i want to take care of both in this frame and our sky frame to make things a little bit easier for us so rather than trying to do that through white balance and through the 10th slider we're going to use the hsl panel for that before we get there though i do want to open my shadows a little bit i want to recover highlights quite a bit because in this frame remember this is going to be for the shadow areas of our image and there really is no need to have our highlights and our whites you know very bright because all that's really doing is increasing contrast and in this situation we actually need to decrease contrast that way we can have our shadow areas very flat but still very very open you know if the more contrast we add the more shadow information we're going to lose but if we have a nice flat a flat image for our shadow areas we're going to be able to keep them dark but still keep them detailed that's important so i'm going to go ahead and open the shadows bring down exposure a bit really keeping an eye on the histogram to make sure that we're not you know approaching black with any of this let's go down to the detail tab we're going to mask out some sharpening by holding down alt or option and then sliding the masking slider in the in the sharpening section to the right there's no need to sharpen noise we only need to sharpen details and then i want to decrease the radius increase the detail that's just something i do in all of my images to make sure that it's a very fine grain sharpening and if we zoom in here you can see that things are really quite clean there's a few hot pixels in here and actually if we add a little bit of color noise reduction that's going to help with a lot of those hot pixels if we look at this hot pixel here this is with no color noise reduction you can see how saturated these blue pixels are but if i add a bunch of color noise reduction it desaturates those and it gets us to a little better place and really that's kind of the only noise reduction we need to do in this which is pretty impressive let's go down to our color mix mixer in the in lightroom it's just the hsl panel and what i want to do is we're going to desaturate these reds a little bit so we're here in the saturation tab let's desaturate those reds but let's also go over to the hue tab and push these reds a little bit towards orange that way rather than feeling like really red light pollution we're going to make it actually blend with some of the warm tones that were happening inside the milky way and with our light painting if we can kind of make all of that match a little bit it'll have a more more cohesive color palette rather than having that bright red that just demands demands the eye in the background and we can even kind of bring down the luminance of those oranges and it'll really tone that down quite a bit okay at this point i'm just going to hit ok and now that has taken care of the the shadow frame now we need to go ahead and go up turn on our sky frame double click it and we're going to process this one in adobe camera raw and try to get the milky way get the sky looking the way we want it we're going to want to add contrast trying to make that milky way really stand out but also because we took this at iso 4000 we might need to start doing a little bit of noise reduction or at least like keep an eye on the noise make sure we're not adding too much so if we go up to the basic panel let's try to get our white balance in the realm where we want it when i'm picking a white balance for my for my sky frames astrophotography frames i'm always trying to get it to where there's cool tones but not too many in the sky i don't want the the area between the stars to be blue but i also want there to be a color temperature difference between the warm areas in the milky way and that sky so a cool little trick for getting your white balance you know a little bit closer to where you want it is i'll go down and i will just crank the saturation all the way up down here and then i will pick my pick my white balance it really helps you see what tones and colors you have going on in your sky by bumping that up and then once we find our white balance we'll bring it back down a little bit more magenta warm it up just a tiny bit something like this i like the colored you know the color contrast between the areas between the milky way between the stars and the gases in the milky way so let's bring the saturation back down i like this for our white balance something i do in all astrophotography images to make the stars pop is i like to really increase the whites so by bringing up the white slider you can see that it brightens the image overall but it also adds a lot of contrast in the highlights which are going to be our stars and then i can bring the highlight slider to the left add a little contrast and bring down the exposure so by doing that we've added a lot of contrast in the sky we've made the stars pop a little bit more and you know the rest of the image doesn't look great but that's okay because we're going to be using the other frame for our shadow information so we can we can really block up our shadows here and we're going to be just fine is let's go down to our detail tab now decrease the radius increase the detail mask out our sharpening by holding down alt or options sliding this to the right and i want to slide this far enough to where we're not sharpening the area between stars we're only sharpening the stars themselves there's no point in sharpening noise because it's only going to make the noise problem worse so let's slide this quite a ways over to the right where we're sharpening stars and details but not much else now let's zoom in to our sky here and see if we even need to add any noise reduction i try to avoid it if i can once i add a little bit of noise reduction but not go too crazy with it about 14 points to me looks just fine so at this point i feel like sky is looking pretty good one last thing to take care of because we're going to be blending this with the shadow information file we want to make sure that these reds down here are very similar to you know the other frame so let's do the same thing that we did in the other frame let's go to the saturation desaturate those reds go to the hue push those reds over towards orange some of the oranges a little bit towards yellow let's go to the luminance bring down the luminance of the reds we got to really take care or take it easy with the oranges because we have orange in our milky way here if you see when i do this it really affects that area so we can't really bring down the luminance of the orange but we can in the reds so i said something like that i think will work ideally we're not going to be using any of this frame in that area on those silos but you know just to make the blending process a little bit easier the more they match the less it's going to matter so it's good to do a little bit of matching now so i'm going to hit ok the first step to this is let's bring in our sky into our shadow information frame so we're going to reactivate this layer mask which is going to hide our sky frame because black conceals white reveals white reveals black conceals so now we have a black layer mask here and as i grab a paint brush we're going to make sure that it is 100 white we're going to use a 100 opacity 100 flow and i'm going to start at the top of the frame and start bringing it in so now what the goal here is to bring it down close to close to our schoolhouse without actually overlapping anywhere the reason we got to be careful not to overlap is because remember how blocked up those shadows were in our shadow areas so we want to make sure that we don't accidentally do any of that so we're bringing it down close to the horizon and we're kind of creating a little bit of a halo here you can see you can see where i have stopped just bringing it down fairly close to the schoolhouse and that's looking pretty good now now what we need to do is we need to make a selection of some kind to help us finish off that blend process so we could make a selection just with the quick selection tool you know we have pretty sharp lines here so that would actually work pretty well another thing we could attempt is we could see if the photoshop select sky option works as well let's just go ahead and try that let's see this is not how i did it the first time but we can try it let's go to select sky and we'll see if it makes a decent selection of the sky if we zoom in here it looks like it's done a very decent job around this school house so you know that's a one click thing might as well use it let's go ahead and hit controller command h and which will hide the marching ants with our white paintbrush let's finish the area around the schoolhouse and we're going to stay zoomed in and make sure that it doesn't create any weird artifacts if that selection isn't great then it it will create artifacts but honestly as i do this it's looking pretty decent you know we want to make sure that we don't have any weird streaked out stars so that's why you want to zoom in as you do this and it's really kind of amazing how easy that select sky option is inside of photoshop in the past i i will either use a quick selection tool or i will more likely use a luminosity mask but you have to be so much more careful with the luminosity mask than you do with this select sky so let's zoom in here see if this was selected so this is an area that was not part of the selection that photoshop gave us so we'll have to remember to come back to that let's see how it did over by these bushes so as i start to bring this in honestly it looks pretty decent now you can see one of the the strange things that we have going on here is we have more noise in the sky than we do you know not in the sky so we're going to have to do something about that later on we'll make a mental note of that did a pretty decent job here around the silo which is pretty cool and you know coming from someone that's been doing these types of images for a while this select sky feature in photoshop is almost painfully easy like it almost feels a little bit like cheating because i had to work way harder than this not long ago and now everybody else gets to do it the easy way cheaters okay so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to hit the backslash key below the backspace key and it's just going to kind of give me a quick visual to see if there's any spots that i missed so these red areas are areas that i still need to bring in in my blend here so we'll quickly go in grab those again you bring up this visualization mask using the backslash key below the backspace key it's just a quick way to visualize any areas that you still need to bring in to your so now i've deselected the sky by going ctrl or command d for deselect and now we need to go in and make a new selection just so we can bring in this area here we don't want to try to just manually paint it because if i try you can see that we're going to create an artifact there so what we need to do and this is really simple because we have nice sharp edges to work with here we're just going to go up grab our quick selection tool which is this guy here quickly select this and then with that selected grab our brush and paint through that selection and bada bing bada boom it works like a stencil so there we go now when we zoom in turn this layer off and on before after we have blended the shadow information frame with that sky frame and honestly for most astrophotography those are going to be the two big main steps if you can take a nice long exposure to get nice clean shadows and then a faster exposure to freeze the stars that's going to get you through most astrophotography and this is called dual processing or exposure blending or shutter speed stacking or twilight blending because if you do that that that frame for the shadow information a little bit earlier in the evening when the ambient light is still a little bit brighter you you can do it with a lower iso and get much cleaner shadows okay so the next step is to bring in our light painted frame so if i turn on this first one you can see i basically literally shot it with very similar settings as our sky frame but there's a lot of light painted areas that i don't want to bring in we want to bring in some but not all now there's a really useful blend mode called lighten where if i change it to lighten it's only going to bring in the pixels that are brighter than the pixels below which is really really useful but as it is in my opinion this is overdone and it brings in areas that we don't necessarily want and anywhere that the stars moved oftentimes it'll also bring in the stars which we don't want so it's not perfect we're still going to have to use a layer mask for this but we also need to tweak this so it's a little bit more subtle so the first thing i'm going to do is double click on this layer which is going to bring up adobe camera because we open this up as a smart object and that means that we still have access to the raw file and now we can kind of mellow it out and make it to where it's you know it's going to blend a little bit more tastefully with the frames below it so for me in order to make it more tasteful we need to recover highlights so those highlights are not quite as bright maybe we can open shadows decrease a little contrast and we can kind of be a little bit more creative with color temperature too because we're shooting in raw i can kind of make this light as cool or as warm as we want so i think in the original edit i kind of went with a cooler color temperature for the outside the exterior light kind of mimic some kind of moon light or something and then i went warmer with the interior light but it can really kind of be whatever you want but i'm going to go a little bit cool with this recover those highlights quite a bit and let's go ahead and throw a graduated filter and darken the highlights over on the left side of the frame just like this it's more of a spotlighty effect on the on the schoolhouse itself rather than the stuff happening off to the left and then we're going to hit okay so now you can see when we turn this off and on it's a cooler color temperature it's not as contrasty it blends a little bit better but it's also happening in areas that we don't want it so let's activate this layer mask and because it's filled with black that means it's going to hide everything and now just grab a paint brush we have it set to the light and blend mode so it's only going to bring in where these pixels are brighter than the the layers below it and with a white layer mask and with a white paint brush i'm just going to start bringing it in i've got a very soft paintbrush here we're going to bring it in on the building now i'm going to decrease my opacity like 40 and see if we can just kind of feather it in a little bit let's go even 20 percent i don't want to get over in here where you can actually see where i was i wanted to have a nice smooth transition from light painted to not light painted so before after before after you also want to be kind of careful make sure that we're not getting any duplicated stars that's really easy to do if you're not paying attention what i like about this light painted frame and is that is it that it adds just a little bit of dimensionality to the to the light it's not super flat it's got a little bit of it's got a highlight side a shadow side and the cool thing about smart objects is that if we decide well i don't really like this cooler color temperature let's double click on that smart smart object layer and let's see what it looks like warmed up so i've just warmed it up hit ok and you know i kind of like that warmer color temperature i think it feels a little bit more like it's getting hit with a light rather than um moonlight so let me tell you about a little business you've probably never heard of they're called squarespace so i've been using squarespace for like seven years and the reason i use it is because it's really really easy i don't know how to code i don't know any of that but i know how to make my squarespace website look exactly the way i want it you know the galleries look good they look clean they're really easy to put together and i'm able to you know sell spots to my workshops because their ecommerce section is really intuitive it links with stripe it all just works so the cool thing about squarespace is that you don't have to sign up with any kind of credit card or anything like that to give it a try just go to squarespace.com forward slash nick page and then you can do your 14 day free trial and if you decide that it is for you use the offer code nic page at checkout and that's going to get you 10 off your first purchase so thank you to squarespace for sponsoring this week's video let's get back to the edit one more layer to go to bring this in we've got this light painted interior here let's change blend mode to lighten and you see as is it's pretty bright and it's very neutral to very white so let's turn on the layer mask let's double click the smart object layer and let's see if we can really darken it down recover those highlights a lot so we still have you know highlight information there i actually blew out looks like i overexposed some of the areas there so we don't want to go too dark and let's warm it way up so it feels like there's kind of a warmish red light emanating from inside add a little negative clarity a little negative dehaze make it a little bit more glowy hit okay so now we can just manually paint on this layer mask i'm going to go to 100 white paint brush and i can just bring that in honestly part of me doesn't even want to include that but for the sake of this tutorial we'll include it so before after before after and if we turn off both of these light painted frames it went from this to this and just kind of gives us something a little extra just something special no big deal but i think it's i think it's cool so at this point there's more that we could do we could go in and we could clone out the airplanes in the sky the satellite and then obviously i would want to do some dodging and burning add a little contrast in the milky way but the skeleton of the frame is here we took those four frames we blended them into one we have nice sharp stars with a nice long exposure so we got cleaner shadows and the the light painted frames added a nice dimensionality to the frame light painting is so much fun to do because you know there's no end to how much you can do you could do hundreds of these layers if you wanted to and just do little bits at a time just remember that the light light and blend mode is your friend when you're putting these together and then when you combine that with a smart object so you can really tweak it and make it blend tastefully and and then you can use layer masks as well to bring it in just in the areas you need it's it's really powerful too so hopefully you'll give some of this stuff a try and hopefully this was interesting to you guys so yeah thank you guys for a moment so thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video take it easy everybody

Channel: Nick Page

Views: 21,970

Keywords: photography, landscape photography, nick page, travel, Astrophotography, photoshop, tutorial, post processing, milkyway, editing the milkyway, twilight blend, light painting

Id: dsQGMFcQDco

Length: 26min 3sec (1563 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021