Basic Photoshop Milky Way Stacking & Blending Tutorial

[Music] hey everybody thanks for tuning into my youtube channel today I'm gonna try a stacking method that I haven't done before it's completely in Photoshop with a little bit of editing in Lightroom but most of this is pretty straightforward not too hard to understand and yeah whether you're on Mac or PC and you own Photoshop you should have no problem following along so this photo was taken about two days ago a friend of mine and I went to the Eastern Sierras found this lake with a beautiful reflection and shot the Milky Way there for way too long but I did come back with a bunch of files that I wanted to play around with for a new tutorial video and this is one of the shots that I wanted to work on I took I believe it's 14 yep I took 14 sky images and I took 4 ground images and I'm going to blend my stack sky with my stacked foreground so that I can have a very clean polished product in the end now I'm gonna just start with Lightroom with my edits and I'm just gonna select the 14 sky photos first I'm immediately gonna go down and hit remove chromatic aberration and enable profile Corrections and I want to increase my exposure a bit so that when I'm balancing my white balance by increasing my vibrance and saturation all the way up I have a better idea what's going on so it's very cool I'm going to increase my temperature so that it's pretty even and I'm going to increase my tint so that's also even as well and it might take a little bit to get to where you want it to be but it shouldn't be too difficult you kind of want to look for kind of strange assay but like a muddy looking image at least for the editing that I do so once you're relatively happy with what you have you can go ahead and reduce your vibrance and reduce your saturation back to zero it's a very flat looking sky so I'm going to add some contrast to this image and decrease my highlights a little bit increase my shadows just a little bit increase my whites a tad and I'm gonna leave the blacks alone I'm gonna increase my clarity just for a little bit more punch and I'm going to play with a tone curve by increasing blacks dropping it down and then bringing up my highlights just a little bit and then I'm gonna jump into my saturation and increase my orange increase my yellow Reds a little bit and purple and magenta tiny bit as well now there's some green air glow going on I'm going to increase the green a little bit as well I just want to have I really like the air glow I want it to be a little bit more punchy so once I have those settings in place I'm going to sync my settings across do all the Milky Way photos and once that is done I'm going to right click on one of the images go to edit in and open as layers in Photoshop once Photoshop is loaded all my sky images I'm gonna go back to Lightroom and work on my foregrounds so what I want to do is select all for my foregrounds I'm also going to select one of my sky images and using that sky image I'm gonna hit sync and synchronize those settings to my foreground and if I toggle between my foreground and my sky my foreground is really blown out so I actually want to reduce my exposure quite a bit so that it's more in line with what my sky looks like and that's actually really close the reason you want to do this is because when you blend the image later you want it to be more seamless I'm able to like pull more information out with my by increasing my shadows without the noise getting like too intense and all these like white dusts and specks I'm gonna remove easily in Photoshop now the my foregrounds were longer exposures there were three minutes each they were at iso 2000 whereas my skies were eight seconds each at ISO 12800 it's twelve thousand eight hundred ridiculous and then the other thing is I get a lot of this Moray effect going on that's what happens when you click enable profile Corrections fortunately I'm gonna be able to remove this when I'm editing my image but like this is this would be so unacceptable for me so I'm gonna not click on the sky or just select the foreground and once I reduce the exposure for my foreground on that one image I'm just gonna hit sync and apply that across my four own images so once those are all done I'm going to right click on this again and edit in open as layers in Photoshop and I'm gonna let my foreground images load in Photoshop as well so once everything is loaded for my four grounds I'm going to right click and select all the layers I'm going to hit command or control C and then I got to go back into my sky stacks or my sky layers and I'm going to hit command or control V to paste my foregrounds in there I'm gonna hit command or control G to group them and I got to rename them foreground and I'll just close that for now now with my skies I am going to select all those and also hit commander control G to group those and rename them sky and I'm gonna start editing those first so I'll bring to the top now I'm going to open up the group I did notice that this top layer moved a little bit more when I was editing it so I'm gonna delete it and then this is just gonna be a 13 layer stack for my sky and this method is super easy the first image you just want to apply a layer mask to you want to select your brush and all you want to do is increase your brush size make sure that the opacity and flow are 100 with a smoothing of 0 and then your size wants to be pretty large but it depends on with the images and keep your hardness at 50 and all you really want to do is just using the black brush you want to brush out the foreground and if you hit the backslash key which is right under the delete button you can bring up the the red layer mask so you can have a better idea of what you are doing and you don't have to be 100% perfect but it helps to be pretty close and all you want to do is just brush out that foreground so once you are happy with your painterly skills just on a Mac it's option you hold option I'll toggle up the mask first but you want to apply this mask to all the images in the stack so on a Mac you can hit option and just select the mask and keep selecting it and dragging it down and it gets applied to everything I'm sure it's command on a Windows PC or Windows computer but once those are all applied you can then right-click all the images go to edit Auto align layers and hit Auto and what this is gonna do is it's you've masts at the foreground it's gonna take all of your skies and stack them on top of each other kind of like starry landscape stacker does for on a Mac it I found that this method is really good if you don't have starry landscape stacker and I'm really starting to enjoy the results so once those are all stacked I'm gonna deselect them all by just clicking the top layer and if you zoom in you can see that there is very little met movement because I shot it such a high ISO it's extremely noisy so I'm going to go ahead and remove these masks by right-clicking on them a hitting delete layer mask and then once I've deleted them all you can see what those layer masks did if I start hiding some of these you can see the movement going on in the foreground so once those are all all the layer masks are removed you can right-click on the first one and select all of the images and then I'm going to right click on one of the images and go to convert to smart object so once that's done stacking I'm going to go into layer smart objects stack mode and median and this is the difference in stacking your image so this is with it unstacked this is with the blend mode applied to it and then this is unstacked and this is the blend mode applied you can see the movement in the foreground we are going to remove that movement so I'm going to close my sky out for a second I'm going to bring in my foreground and the foreground is pretty easy it's the same as the sky so I'll select all four layers I'm going to right click on them and go to convert to smart object and then once that is done I'm going to layer smart objects stack mode median once the smart object blend mode has been applied what we'll want to do is blend the sky in the foreground together so with the quick selection tool I'm going to select a pretty general outline of the foreground and trying to be as precise as I can I'm going to use this selection to create a mask on top of my sky layer by turning the sky layer on adding the quick selection mask and then pressing command I so that now our foreground is on top of our sky now when you zoom into the fine detail the trees you can see that there's like a little bit of trailing and obvious artifacts going on so I'm gonna use a soft brush around 40% and then using the white brush I'm just going to brush it in it there's gonna be a loss of detail in some of these trees but fortunately the trees are kind of an accent to what's really going on with the sky and the melons at this point we're pretty much done the only other things I might do is use the Dodge and burn tool to kind of play with my sky a little bit more I'd probably use the minimization with the Stars to reduce as much stars so that's more of a clean look and then possibly well definitely removing some of the green and yellow hues that are going on here in the foreground but this tutorial is all about stacking in Photoshop so I'm going to end this video right now if anybody has any questions about this blending process or the stacking process let me know in the comments below I will post a completed image at the very end of this video thank you for watching and have a good one you [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Steven J Magner

Views: 112,456

Keywords: astrophotography, milky way, photoshop, tutorial, california, lightroom, starry landscape stacker, sequator, stars, hoya, slik, canon

Id: NS6tageabR4

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 14 2018