Capture One Pro Tips - Editing the Night Sky, Stars & Milky Way

[Music] in this session we'll cover the adjustments and techniques available in capture one that allow you to get the very best out of your night sky images now shooting the galaxies above our heads can be incredibly fun especially rewarding when we see the results it's a great way of exploring how locations look at night as well as experimenting with different camera settings this shot for example was taken while I was playing with the zoom ring on my lens for a short period within a long exposure of an amazing view of the Milky Way but photographers often return home to be disappointed with the content they shot once they see on a big screen the image can look flat or dull or not as vivid as they remember often with a sort of muddy tint to it and they don't know why well in this session we'll uncover the tools you need to know to get those images back to how you remember and back to how you remember is a key message here we all remember a scene very differently to each other to sum the night sky is a deep cool blue to others the lights and surrounding areas make it feel warmer or even more pink in tone so the techniques we'll run through here or design to get your image to look and feel the how you want it to in as natural a way as possible but before we get into the editing side let's just briefly touch on how we capture the night sky to get the best results when we post-process there's really not much secrecy around this we're limited in what we can do at night with most of the cameras that are on the market but here are the key settings you need to bear in mind first is oh you're going to need a high ISO but only push it as high as your camera will allow without introducing significant noise be really careful at high ISOs if your sensor isn't capable of shooting well in low light then aperture basically as wide as your lens will allow but F 2.8 should really be seen as a minimum ideally you want one point for one point a if possible we need to capture as much light as you can physically allow into that sensor shutter speed comes next we need to keep this to a range below 25 seconds or 30 seconds of the push it is simply to stop the stars near image from moving across the frame turning from points of light into lines or trails unless of course that's the specific look that you're going for and then finally focal length in most cases you'll want this to be as wide as possible to get more of the night sky in your shot but somewhere around the 35 mil equivalent of sort of 12 to 24 millimeters that should do just fine of course you can go longer but you'll notice more movement in the styles and capture less the overall galaxy in your shot as a result in essence my simple rule is as wide as possible as fast as possible as sensitive as possible without too much noise or a compromise of that triangle if one element yourself isn't quite up to scratch when it comes to actually taking the shot focus is then the most important factor you're gonna need to focus on infinity in 90% of cases and that focus is going to be manual there are a variety of techniques to doing this in the dark but a lot of it comes with trial error zooming in and now adjusting and trying again your depth of field shouldn't be too much of an issue on a wide lens but do make sure you keep checking the foreground in the preview screen just in case you're in one of those 10% of other cases that needs a closer focusing point and then finally exposure your camera is gonna tell you that the scene is underexposed of course it is anything less than middle gray will be classed by the meter in your camera is underexposed and we're out here shooting in the dark so don't rely on your meter instead use the preview screen and histogram after every shot and adjust accordingly if your light painting the foreground bear that in mind so you don't over expose those elements as you shooting too in an ideal scenario when you look at the histogram on the back of your camera you want to see that that left-hand side here of the histogram drops down just before the zero wall of the lower end of the shadows so let's take a look at the stars themselves without any distractions of any foreground and see what we need to consider when were editing so looking at our histogram here we can see that most of this scene is indeed dark just as the night sky but what about the stars themselves so people always seem to think they'll be bright and overexposed in comparison to the sky right we'll actually no let's just zoom right in so aside from all the noise in this shot and there's quite a lot we can see the stars range from this one here in the middle which is pretty bright it's up there in this sort of 200 mark if you checked the value on the top of the bar up here right the way down to fully in the shadows if I pick on some of these stars here so 54 out of 255 85 49 39 and so on and of course everything in between we can also use this orange line on the histogram as you see I'm walking across the screen as I do that that orange line moves around the histogram and that showing me live feedback for exactly where on the scale the pixels under my mouse pointer sit that's going to be really handy in a second so why is the fact the stars actually sit in the shadows important well let's think about one of the tools we'd often consider using to enhance the stars it'll be contrast right well wrong actually because the contrast tool is designed to force the histogram out from the center so it goes from the center out towards the edges making the bright element brighter and the dark element even darker still if we use that tool well we've made the highly exposed stars a little bit brighter we've actually made most of the other stars even darker why well because they sat in the shadows so we're forcing those shadows to move to the left of the histogram taking the stars with them and underexposed and the few highlights we had remaining will move to the right but they don't really notice them because half of our galaxy is now missing this is also why the HDR tools whites and highlights sliders only work on a limited number of stars in any shot so how do we enhance and increase the clarity of the Milky Way in a nice gun shot well the clues and the question really is with the clarity tool so for those of you who've watched our pro tip session on the clarity tool itself you'll remember the way that it works but essentially it identifies the borders where there are differences between two areas one relatively lighter or darker than their neighbor it makes them then even lighter or even darker in comparison to each other which is perfect for what we're trying to do here the star may not be bright but it's definitely brighter than the dust either surrounded by so adding a little bit of neutral or natural clarity will give our stars even more definition the seem a lot more pop overall and be really careful with its partner of structure we also covered this in the pro tip session on clarity but it's looking for texture and it's gonna pick up any noise in the shadows and make features of noise instead of allowing it to all disappear into the background while we're speaking of noise let's just take a quick look over on the details tab now as you'd expect capture one will have applied the correct amount of noise reduction and sharpening for your particular lens and camera combination but the temptation is often to use even more noise reduction on the lights card to try and clean it up well here's a surprising message from me for the first time don't use noise reduction if you don't have to we could let's just zoom right in so we can show you what we're talking about here so we could dial in some luminance noise good option but then if I do that we lose sharpness and actually we lose some of the stars in that process so we could dial in some detailed noise reduction but when dealing with the night sky we end up rather ironically introducing what seems to be even more noise as a result so that's no good to us color noise reduction can help us the result is normally sharper than news and luminance on its own it doesn't really add much more noise itself but you might find some strange patterns and artifacts when you print the whole image as a resort using it too much so as with all of these things just be careful with how much you're using them the one that I tend to stay away from specifically however especially with stars is the single pixel removal function why well it's designed to remove tiny little bright spots of light which are out of place in the surrounding area kind of like well a star right so while the single pixel removal tool can help with a hot or stuck pixel it does very very slightly reduce the number of visible stars that you captured so I would leave it and manually fix the one or two hot pixels and said if you can even find them in the shop so excepting we're limited in terms of how much noise reduction we can actually do how do we make the style really pop without adding noise if the contrast tool is also off limits well levels is the answer and specifically levels and curves for those of you that wanted to form some slightly more advanced histogram adjustments but it's the levels tool that really is the killer feature here remember levels allows us to stretch out the histogram we can decide what we consider to be shadows and what we consider to be highlights by shifting those input levels along the bottom to where the data and I histogram actually says so that means we're telling capture 1 to treat certain elements on the photos such as those darkest bars as if they were more brightly exposed while leaving the shadows where they were or we can even make the shadows darker if we choose as well be really careful adjusting this mid-tone slider in levels you can have some unwanted effects but bear in mind that we can also apply levels to a specific part of the image not just the whole thing by using a gradient mask or a painted mask with the brush and it means that you don't have to affect the entire foreground of a whole image in the same way and finally we come under white balance and this is possibly the most contentious area when it comes to editing the sky at night your camera's auto white balance is likely to get this wrong at the point of capture especially if you've got full ground lights involved with their artificial lighting so unless you've set it manually to some extent or another you will need an element of color temperature and tint correction when you load the image in to capture one going back to what I said earlier about getting the scene back to how you remember it that's what's important at this stage to me the night sky is always felt cooled with a cold temperature of light so I tend to have my white balance set to somewhere between sort of three and four thousand and a tenth of somewhere between sort of one and ten but it really is a case of experimenting and it depends on the image itself there are of course out there what's called light pollution filters there's many brands that make them and they can help with cooling the scene at the point of capture and cutting certain wavelengths of light to stop they effectively light pollution we've actually reviewed them in depth on our website but in reality I wouldn't recommend a single one of them for use on these types of shots and there's a simple reason why when you're using one of these filters you still need to set a manual white balance and they actually cut an amount of light sometimes actually up to a whole stop in the process of being used so you know all that light that you've just spent a fortune on the right equipment to capture in the first place you're now cutting here to save yourself a little bit of time in the editing room so with that white balance change we now have a corrected view of the stars alone and we could actually go into our curves tool and just bring that up a touch there with all that done let's apply some of those techniques to some more interesting shots or say with some foreground elements so welcome to New Zealand lake tekapo to be precise sadly is now yet another honeypot for tour buses full of instagramers and so on but it's still an amazing place to experience and see the Milky Way this church has become impossibly famous mostly because of its lakeside sort of setting and how perfectly photogenic it always seems to be now in this shot we've got the corner of the Milky Way up above but also the church in the ground below with the mountains in the distance and maybe a little touch of a warm glow from some light matang now let's get started first with the overall white balance of the scene of course I could actually split this using two different masks but to me making it a little cooler all around probably to somewhere like 3500 ish and then a little bit of tint that gives me the right feel to this shot overall so I'm gonna stick with one overall white balance for now now let's turn on that clarity tool we can push it relatively high here but not so much that we're introducing excessive noise if I want to suppress the noise a little more well we could get just sort of gently adjust some of those sliders on the details tab but just go careful with them because you're gonna risk making some of the image worse if you get it wrong so by moving the cursor around the image just like we did before we can use our little orange line on that histogram to confirm that most of the sky indeed sits in the shadows area so we can actually use our HDR tool right now to bring that section down and instantly add some contrast we can also slide those highlights and whites all the way up they're not going to have a massive effect as we've already discussed but those stars that are in those highlight areas are now going to get a little boost - now what about levels well I want to increase the levels of contrast in the upper sky but I really don't want to pull too much of this foreground up at the same time so unlike the last scene where we did the whole thing across the whole image in this one we're going to use a gradient mask because that's gonna help us control what's actually pulled up so let's create a new layer with a new gradient mask really really soft from top to bottom and with that mask let's adjust our levels from there so this then only applies to that adjustment layer I'm going to pull our highlights in but I'm also gonna pull our shadows down as well now if I don't like the vignette that's now occurred on the image we'll have got two ways of dealing with that one of course is in the lens profile so I could put our light fall-off up a little bit and then the second of course we've got our vignette tool itself and we could obviously dog add in a touch too I'm relatively happy with that result so now let's look at the warmth out on the horizon so if that were bothering me create a new layer and we'll call it warm and I'm gonna actually draw a very quick mask over this section here with our brush and with a lower opacity set I can just go over it a few times here and now I can go to my color editor and my color editor I'm not going to use the basic tab I'm gonna go to advanced I'm gonna choose this area here of potentially light pollution tell the color editor I want to select all of the color around this area here and with that color I'm going to pull the lightness down and maybe the saturation down and maybe the hue altered a little bit too now to me personally I kind of like the glow so to me it's probably gonna stay but the color editor is your friend when you're trying to get rid of those warm glows city out there as well and equally you can use a gradient mask to control the area that that color editor is affecting too so that's our first edit so let's look at before and after we go from a relatively flat scene with some of the sort of murky effect up in the sky to a set of stars in the Milky Way that really pop over a really cool Church down below so what about where we have a foreground that's not particularly well illuminated so let's say there was no moonlight at all or the object was too far away to even add some light just like here so this is a shot of the Milky Way over the top of Mount Cook so here we have a challenge we need to bring up the brightness of the mountain range down here while keeping the feel of the sky and the stars above as an added bonus we've actually got a little shooting star over here above the peaks so just as before we're gonna start with the white balance let's get it to within that sort of 3,000 to 4,000 range so I'm just gonna go back to my exposure to have to do that and we're probably going to go to bit cooler maybe there and I'm going to pour my tint up to match that feel there now of course what we could do is take your reading from the snow on these mountaintops but just be careful because sometimes the snow reflects some of the light especially in moonlight and you can get us a false reading but you can already see how much of a difference we've already dialed in compared to that auto setting that we had before so we'll now start the work of separating the two areas the sky and the foreground what we'll do is we'll create 2 gradient filters that will affect the two parts in different ways so first let's draw the one for the foreground so brand-new layer we're going to call this one foreground and we're gonna stretch up a gradient mask with quite a soft transition I don't want a harsh line over the mountain and using our mouse again so as I move the mouse around the image we see the orange along the histogram down here it's very very firmly in the blacks area of the histogram it's not in shadows shadows are around here it's fully in the lowest parts of the the histogram range so it's the black slider that we're going to use to pull that up and there comes our full rack pretty cool now I'm going to edit the gradient itself using the Alt key or the option key just to make it slightly asymmetrical so the fall-off is a bit harder over these mountains now of course if we have more time we're done on this session but we could of course refine that mask a little bit further we could edit some of the edges we could even erase parts that aren't relevant to us but for the purposes of this that's given us enough to separate out the foreground and be able to see some of the detail again so now for the sky same principle we're gonna create a brand new layer I'm gonna call it sky and let's draw another gradient and that gradient is gonna be pulled down here so not quite over the mountains and then with that gradient we're going to pull up our clarity just like before and we're gonna use our levels to bring those stars a little bit more vivid in this scene now of course overall I could go back to the background and I could use that little hump in our curve just to really make the image pop but while there's some final tweaking to do to fix maybe some of the mask areas here these are the essences of what you need to consider when you've got a foreground and a sky that aren't evenly illuminated so we now have a foreground was visible again what a difference in the before and after results if I goes from before so after and it's literally taking a few clicks obviously the more time we spend on this stuff the better it's gonna be but in essence that's already now just looking at this shot in particular we could probably afford to put in a little bit of extra sharpening so back on our background layer in fact no we're gonna do it on our sky layer I'm just gonna dial in a touch more traveling just to make those stars really crisp now you want to be careful you don't reduce too much noise but in overall terms that looks pretty neat to me so what if we have enough light or indeed we've actually added some to the shot so we can use the same technique here to edit the image but we can also then apply different white balance to the top and to the bottom based on the fact that we've use artificial light in our scene so in this case here we're out on the bad water salt flats of Death Valley we can use two really simple gradients to control the look of the floor which was briefly lit in contrast to the galaxies above our heads so let's draw our first gradient I'm just going to switch back to my exposure tap to do that so I've got a gradient here and we'll call it hexagons and it's going to be quite a hard gradient along that valley floor and with that gradient I'm just going to adjust our white balance to be cooler and our tint to get the salt flats were relatively neutral here I could actually dial in a little bit of clarity and actually on here we get a 14 structure because there's actually quite a lot of texture in those formations then for the sky so it's create a new layer sky and with this one again same thing they can have really harsh gradient down here because we've got these brother handy Mountains to have the bottom to help with that and with us guy well we all have a slightly different white balance certainly a bit stronger tint here we're gonna have our standard sort of clarity darling and we're gonna do a little bit of a levels adjustment to make the Milky Way will really come to life be careful with those shadows but that feels about right now remember the feel of the image is a huge part down to your white balance setting on that's the key element that you need to get back to what you remember I'm dialing in settings based on my taste but it doesn't mean they're correct so try an experiment with this yourself now with these low toned images just like we did on the image before if you need sometimes a bit of an extra boost above what the levels can do then this is where curves come in so putting a slight bow in that curve especially in these sky areas that can really really help bring up the mid-tones more subtly than if I try and do it with the mid-tone slider in the level section here instead in this case that works out pretty good now it'll be wrong if I finish this session without covering a shot of the Aurora so whether it's the Northern Lights or the southern lights to show above us when these things become active can be really incredible and our cameras actually capture them exceptionally well quite often better than our eyes so typically you can get away with a faster shutter speed because the activity in the sky is actually adding quite a bit of light down to the C but the principles are the same when you're shooting and when editing it's not that different either so clarity is still your friend here we can dial in a certain amount of clarity just to make that definition in the sky really stand out it does the same for the strands of the colored light above our head as it does for the stars themselves levels can also help but when it comes to aurora be really careful because it takes a very small level adjustment to accidentally here look at those numbers on the top 255 255 255 there now overexposed and they're clipping so instead of levels especially with the northern lights or the southern lights consider using an S curve in your curves tool instead a really simple S shape on the histogram and look at where the data risen that histogram was to where you want to try and make that adjustment so I'm gonna pull down my dark areas here leave that one where it is and I'm gonna pull up at these mid-tones here and that gives me a little more contrast let me just do without and with without blowing out any of these highlights now of course we've got white balance to play with now that's going to be down to what you remember seeing especially with the variety colors that are in the sky but if you can use something neutral at the snow here then that can help get it right but just remember the lights in the sky especially under aurora can change the color of the snow too so if I pick this wrong you're going to get a really warm already strange effect general terms just go back to that limit of somewhere between 3000 and 4000 feels about right and the tint to match in this case I also know that the lens was that was being used as got a lot of sharpness fall-off so we're gonna go back to our lens correction tab here and dialing quite a bit of sharpness correction on the edges and to finish actually I'm gonna go one further we're gonna put in one final layer which is gonna be called sky and we're gonna create a subtle gradient that leads up to the top of the image with some light fall-off so we're gonna add in some extra clarity and we're gonna do an adjustment on our levels just this bottom shadow bit just to enhance that look and then we're done so again we go before and after and that's quite a big difference so some simple techniques to make your notes go images really come to life just remember there really isn't one blanket recipe for this type of photography and a lot of fun is actually in the experimentation itself so use this as a guide as a baseline and build on these techniques with a unique look and feel for your own style of images you [Music]

Channel: Paul Reiffer

Views: 10,487

Keywords: Capture One, Post-Processing, Post Processing, Image Editing, Tutorial, Tools, Photo Editing, RAW, Processing, Software, How To, Learn, Guide, Pro, Phase One, Paul Reiffer, Photography, Quick, Lessons, Tips, Tricks, In Depth, Landscape, Settings, Tool, Image Adjustment, 20, Lens, 20.1, Workflow, Correction, Correct, Fix, Contrast, Clarity, Night Sky, Astro, Astrophotography, Milky Way, Galaxy, Stars, Night, Tekapo, Northern Lights, Aurora, Pop, Vivid, Light Painting, Noise Reduction, Noise, Reduce, Light Pollution

Id: TdD2HSfjHO4

Length: 24min 31sec (1471 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020