Milky Way Editing & Blending

all right well welcome again to another video on the channel and this is a very special occasion because I'm actually joined today by my friend Darrell here who is all the way from Texas in the United States of America so Darrell had he find Australia what do you think of the place I'm really pleased to be here this is a fantastic setting and shooting this the other night was really great yeah so that's why we're here because this little old Austin you can see behind us here became the subject of a night scape and Darrell arrived while he was here after dark this is on the farm here property and he came over for a night scape images workshop all the way from the United States so that's a fair old commitment thank you very much for that so ya know he's going to get used to the Australian lingo so we've been talking g'day mate and hey gone and all this other stuff but he's pretty good so anyway what we did we decided to shoot after he came back jet-lagged and everything else we decided to shoot this little of Austin under the Milky Way the Milky Way was fantastic across the horizon here and beautiful dark skies out here so we decided to shoot as part of my post-processing series now I'll spit that out and so we shot the Austin and we'll go through the settings in a minute alright so how did we shoot this little Austin well I was usually one nikon z6 with the 20 millimeter f one point eight and I decided to stack for noise reduction so to do that we put the camera just in here behind that's right now the two of us were together now now my friend Darrell here is a Sony shooter so he's sure you know what you tell us what he is you anyways well it's a Sony a7 three and the settings are slightly different for example the ISO then Richards Nikon but still the results came out amazing following basically Richards guidelines that he's describing to you so what lens were you shooting with it's a it's a zoom it's a 30 a 16 to 35 millimeter and then when shooting at 20 millimeter so yeah that's the Sony 16 to 35 F 2.8 G mastery master yeah okay good lens great lens and he's using an a7 mark 3 which is an awesome camera so pretty much it my is my z6 or from my american friends my z6 is almost an identical specifications camera so anyway we set that down and now that the intention was the shoot for noise reduction now you've seen me do this plenty of times before so to do that we focus on infinity for the sky and then the settings that I had was ISO 6400 at F 2.8 now remember I'm shooting with an F 1.8 lanes but I stopped at the end F 2.8 for some noise and an coma aberration etc and the shutter speed was 15 seconds and I shot a stack of well it was supposed to be 8 but I think I did 9 doesn't matter I did 9 in the end but I was I was aiming to 8 I just lost count which happens all the time it's probably my fault yeah we were chatting and talking and I said I have any shots if we take an R I don't know anyway I think it was 9 in the end and then we only took 2 well actually 3 we took one like painted foreground shot on this right-hand side and another on the left-hand rear of the vehicle and then we put a 0 96 video light on an orange glow a soft glow inside the windscreen of the Austin here so it was only three shots like painted but one of the critical factors for that is to make sure that the focus is spot-on on the car now we found last night didn't we that when we stopped there aperture down to 5 that focus didn't need to be changed from the Infinity that we already had yeah that's right now that's one of the revelations that sometimes you find because when you stop the aperture down you find that the the focus playing increases so this is one of the great advantages and if you're ever worried about that just if you stop your aperture Dennis let's say if eight or something like that you'll get a massive increase in depth of field so anyway we did that we shot the stacked images for the sky we shot the three images for the foreground and now I'm going to run you through the actual post-processing that image to get the end result that we got so Daryl thank you once again it was really good fun it was really great and Darrell's here for the next couple of days and we're doing a nightscape photography workshop here with some other people who are coming weather is absolutely beautiful and we're expecting two clear nights beautiful Australian weather you couldn't ask for anything more cause it's a lovely night all right well thank you Darrell and let's go on to that post-processing and so once again we find ourselves back here in the studio ready to do some editing now it was a few weeks ago when I was actually out on the farm shooting the old Austin with Daryl and it was a great time it's it's been in a bit of a queue actually because I've been processing and working on all of these videos to do with my editing and post-processing techniques and from the comments I've been reading you guys have enjoyed that so this is though the final video of that series for the time being anyway and speaking of enjoying thing got absolutely thoroughly loved spending time with Daryl out there on the farm shooting nightscape images now Daryl came all the way from Dallas Texas in the United States to attend one of my nightscape workshops and I really appreciate the fact that he came all of that way to spend time out here in Australia with me and the other participants that were there we had a great time - beautiful clear nights and next year speaking of nightscape photography workshops all of my workshops for 2020 are already sold out completely which is absolutely amazing and I know that some of you guys are coming along to my workshops next year and I've got probably about five or six people coming from the United States again next year so that's going to be fantastic but anyway first thing I want to do is get stuck into this image on the computer so let's get into that now now here we go we're starting in Lightroom as I normally do and you can see down the bottom here I have my 9 background images now as I said in the video earlier I was intending to shoot 8 I lost count so I shot 9 the adjustments I've made to this image a reasonably minor you can see we increase the exposure a little bit I've changed the tent plus for now I do this because my Nikon z6 has achieved a fair bit to the green side of the color on the TP so I just push a little bit more magenta into it now on this particular image of applied lens profile Corrections as you can see here and that's pretty much all I've done plus just a touch of color noise reduction again just to help with that that tint so if you look at it before and after image you'll notice it's not that much different it's just a fraction brighter and I like to have a little bit brighter image because I can push with these files I can push them a fair bit if you look at the histogram here you can see it's well it's a fair way over towards the center of the image anyway the next step is to sync all of those together and you can see by holding their shift and clicking I can get all of those selected then I'll just press this sync button over here now already done that but essentially what that has done it has copied the settings from that first one to all the rest now what I'm going to do is export those at-st files so let's just do the export window here we go now want to do here is select where I want that to go do with a name I'm going to call that Austin sky gonna change this to TIFF because I don't want them to be compressed at all I want these to be very close to original RAW files no watermark and press export and away we go now that won't take long so we'll go now and have a look at those files okay so we find ourselves here in shaquita because I'm going to stack these start images so I'll just double click on star images and navigate to where they are and as I've said to you countless times in the past make sure you remember where you put things because if you don't you'll be looking for them now Austin with Darrell that's the folder I put them in and here are my files so I select all of those and shoot them off and open them up into shaquita and you'll see them come up here it'll show probably about number four and number five here and there it is as you can see looks pretty good now with this particular program the next thing that I'm going to do select the output so double-click output and I'm just going to call it secreta Austin Darryl just so we can work out which one it is when we go to do it later all right very good now some people do ask me about these other settings in here noise images would be dark frames now I have done dark frames where and that means you put the lens cap on the camera whilst you're out in the field and shoot exactly the same settings with the same ISO everything and just shoot the same length of shutter everything and add those in you can do that here but generally I don't do that because I didn't really notice a whole lot of difference to be absolutely honest with you anyway here we go Composition aligned stars we click on that and we get aligned stars I'm going to click here select best pixels and slide that right across to the other side now I have had questions about this because when you'll notice when I hit for his ground here that that select best pixels becomes unselected but I have noticed that that slider stays right across here so to be honest with you guys I'm not sure if that makes any difference if if I'm clicking that and sliding it and it's actually not doing anything but it doesn't hurt to do it because I've been happy with the results that I've been getting the other thing I click here is this selective box now what that does is if there are things that fly through for example like airplanes and I think you'll find if you look here there is an airplane trail right there just behind the the back of the Austin it actually sees that as a moving pixels if you like and removes them but the same as it does for the noise so it's pretty pretty handy alright so sky region is their next little red dot here we click on that and that asks me how I want to mask it the sky I want to use what's known as this irregular mask and you'll see what happens here so I'm just using my mouse holding down the left mouse key and I'm rubbing out the sky now this is a pretty easy image to rub the sky out with because there's there's no trees and branches things like that to deal with so what I'm doing here I'm just getting down as close as like hand to the tree line in the background then I'm going to get as close as I can down to the shape of the Austin now with this particular program you can't zoom in so I can't get right in close to it it's just not possible okay well I think that looks pretty good I don't think I can get any closer you think I get better at this after doing this so many times but no look I'm really happy with the results this program gives me so next step is to simply press Start which I will do and let's just wait and see how long that takes all right you can see there it is completed successfully at 30 seconds boy that was quick so now we'll just have a look at what it's done right the airplane trail is gone happy about that all I'm going to do now is cross out of this program exit without saving and press yes to that and then we go back to Lightroom so here we are back in Lightroom now you'll note remember that out in the field we took three images one from this side one from the left-hand rear and one of the interior light now that's a z96 video light inside you can see there it's just inside the cabin of the vehicle so the settings for these you can see our PS 20 millimeter focal length ISO 500 at f5 15-second shutter speed now again there's hardly anything done to these images really look at nothing much here except clarity I've put a fair bit of clarity into this image because I really want this foreground to pop now generally speaking with nightscape images if you put too much clarity into the image you will get a lot of noise but the key to this for my images here is that I'm shooting this is a very low ISO ISO 500 so because of that I can increase that clarity quite a bit and it will be introducing some noise but nowhere near enough to hand to be a problem for this particular program so I'm wrapped in that now the other thing I'm going to do is add noise reduction but not much that's that's about 20 color at about 50 and a lens correction so of enable profile Corrections now this is really important because if I didn't enable the profile Corrections for all of the images and that includes the sky images then they wouldn't line up properly so one of the things to consider when doing this type of work is to make sure always that your images I can align up and that means not moving the tripod not moving the camera in between any of the shots alright so what I'm going to do now is select those three images click Edit in open as layers in Photoshop and now Lightroom is going to send all of these images into Photoshop so we're now in Photoshop and you can see here we've got our three layers here one on top of each other which is great now what we need to do is get our sky layer in here so what I'm going to do is go up to file open and then I'm going to be navigating to the file where the image is located when it comes up and as I keep saying gotta know where things are because if you don't austin with darryl here we go it's equator Darryl there we go that's what we want okay so what I'm going to do is simply on this this tab here I'm going to select it copy it go up to edit copy and paste close that one and paste it into this so that's edit paste you can control V I don't like to show shortcuts on my videos because it confuses people but there we go now we've got the sky layer here on top I don't want it on top on it on the bottom so I'm going to drag it down just click it and drag it down to the bottom now as you can see that looks whoops it looks pretty good all I'm going to do now is disable the bottom three layers select the top layer and I'm going to put a layer mask on here add a layer mask guys just click on this little square down the bottom and add a layer mask you see it's white that square next to the layer that's a that's the layer this is the layer mask and my intention here is to actually write out all the stars that you can see in the background even though this was shot at f5 at ISO 500 it's quite amazing how many stars that are still picked up but anyway so to do that I need to go to my paintbrush tool here and make sure they're in here I've got black on top if I want to change that I just click that little arrow and it goes white on top so if I have black on that's what I'm after I want to make sure my opacity here is at 100 and then I'm going to go to my brush and for this particular example I'm going to select the hard brush and a fairly big one which is there now and just simply rub our sky now I've done this before it's a little bit similar to what I just did in shaquita because it's essentially doing the same thing is what I did in secret I'm just getting rid of part of the image that I don't want now of course the thing to consider here now we're just going to get in closer to the car so I can see because I need to get rid of the stars anything that's black in this image doesn't matter it's not going to bother me at all but I do need to get rid of the stars and you will notice I'm not being pedantic about getting in close and selecting the car simply because I don't need to all I want to do is get rid of these stars and you can see I'm still using a hard brush just think about that for a minute I'm using a hard brush now get down there yep that looks pretty good just follow down here there's a few stars in there I'm just going to get rid of everything else down here isn't there not stars let's just grass and trees and what have you in the background and and so that's pretty good now if I turn the background layer on I'll do that now and show you there you can see that looks awful because of this jet all is jagged edge around here but as soon as I select the layer not the layer mask I've selected the layer right here and then changed my blend mode from normal to lighten just disappears isn't that just beautiful it disappears so let me change that back and show you again change it back to normal it's there change it to lighten it's gone just like that because it gets rid of all the dark pixels and leaves the light pixels and that is the only reason I need to rub it those stars all right so if I just apply these other two layers and I'll change that one to lighten as well and now that won't to light and now as you can see here I'll just take that bottom layer out so you can see what I'm talking about you can still see the stars are there in the second and third layer I need to get rid of those how am I going to do that very simple I'm just going to select that layer mask was just created hold down alt on my keyboard and drag it down and that copies the layer mask I just copied it on all those layers now it looks like a dog's breakfast there until I wrestle echt the bottom layer and suddenly beautiful absolutely love it so this technique is something that works beautifully for nightscape images not so beautifully for daytime images because you don't have the contrast between the black and the white in your images there's too many shades of grey and and other things so these light and blend mode doesn't work so well anyway let's move on so the thing I want to do now is just do a little bit of enhancement to my milky way that the shot looks absolutely awesome I love it as it is but like I make it look a little bit better than this so what I'm going to do is click on that bottom layer which is air sky layer and add the curves layer so curves layer you've seen me do this before I'm just going to put a tone curve into this a lot of people ask me why I don't do this in Lightroom why I do it here in Photoshop that's it's a very valid question and one that I have a simple answer for the fact you can do a similar thing in Lightroom but it's a global adjustment what I'm doing here is simply adjusting the background sky not the car in the foreground because it's a separate layer and it's only affecting the layer that's directly underneath it so here we are just add some more bit more pop in the sky there get rid of that and then I'm going to add a I'll do this quite often as a levels adjustment on the same image now it's again it's only adjusting the bottom part of the image so that's adding contrast as well as the curves adjustment did before but just looks it's just doing a little bit different stuff and I really like what that's doing so when you take them out you can see the difference so in other words that's pretty much what it looked like without those adjustments and that's what it looks like with them okay now I really do like what I'm seeing here but what I will do is I'm just going to take away those top three layers just for the moment because I want to do a star minimization on this and some of you are saying a style what well what I want to do is highlight the brightest stars and to do that what I'm going to do is go up to layer merge visible now you'll notice I've deselected these three layers because I don't want to merge them I want to leave them where they are but for the moment I'm gonna click on merge visible and what that has done is made that one layer all those other layers that squash them into one layer but it's still retained these other three here which I'm going to be using a bit later on now I want to go to select so I'm going to go to color range let's have a look at color range and we go up here where it says sampled colors to highlights what I'm going to adjust here is this fuzziness you see a little preview window here of what this is doing and this is this is very much by the way just a trial and error sort of a thing where you just have a bit of a play with these sliders because what it's doing is selecting the sky you can see what part of the sky it's selecting by how bright those those bits are so I'm just going to leave it about there and click OK you can see it's selected the sky one thing I do want to do here is go back to select and go down to modify and then go along to contract no expand I should say I'm gonna give it carried away they expand and I want to expand that by two pixels so just press okay then now I'm going to go back to select the same button again modify and feather and feather that by one pixel you can see a feather radius one click okay all right so that's really good now I'm going to go to filter and we go right into other then we go right down to minimum that one there and where it says preserve you've got two options here you got roundness and squareness now I want to select roundness because stars around here we have a radius now radius is the amount that you're adjusting this now I can change that to a higher number here but I vote from experience that if it's too high you get blotchy black marks and I don't want those so I'm gonna live that 0.8 two pixels and press okay and now what it's going to do is calculate what it needs to do here and I think that's all happened in the background and then I'm going to go back up to select and go deselect you can press control D and get the same thing there but you can see there now now one thing I did forget to do was to copy that layer so you can have it before and after so I'm sorry about that but what it's done has it's actually increased the I guess the visibility of the brightest stars whilst minimizing which is why it's called minimization the lesser bright stars some people will say oh wise you're bother to do that well it's just one of those things that I just like the look of and here we go I'm going to do another little adjustment on this whilst on working on this my warning here is not to go to hard and fast with this don't push it too hard because if you do you'll get you'll get more artifacts but I'm going to put another curves adjustment layer into this just to make it pop out even more now if you look at this image I'm just loving the intensity of this image that look beautiful really really moody just going to turn the other layers back on again and have a look at that isn't that just awesome you can see by the way what happens when you have some of the layers on and some of the layers off what it looks like it's pretty good isn't it I get really excited when I see this I might just add while I'm going another one of those levels adjustments on to that sky just to pop it out make it a bit brighter see how I just increase the the shadows there a little bit just slightly just slightly not much drop the the blacks I really really like that now you can look at this image and say well look fantastic I think it's complete and I'm almost there but I'm going to show you one other thing on this image just to make a little bit more Moody now if you look at the car I really like what's happened at the back of the car here if you look at the front of the car now it was lit from over here I think it's just a little bit over lit on this front bit only by a smidge so what I'm going to do this is really easy to do I'm going to go to my layer mask on that top layer which is that one and I'm just going to lightly rub out some of it but I'm not gonna rub it out at 100% I'm gonna take that down to about 36% I'm gonna get a soft brush here and then increase the size of that brush just somewhere in about there now what I'm going to do I've showed you this before but I'm gonna feather the edge of it see how I'm just rubbing a little bit of darkness into the front of the car just a touch because I think that might look a little bit better it's just that little bit of I don't know this is art this has nothing to do with any sort of scientific fact or scientific whatever process that's how I think it looks good now if I'll just show you this if i press this little arrow and go back to white I can actually rub it back in again and see I can actually put a little bit of a highlight on that door I didn't touch the front there because I just wanted to highlight this bit how about that now you might not want to highlight that but if you don't just put it back again be careful there because I don't want to over do that bit there that I just did say look it's very subjective and and you know I've said I've said to this this to you guys many times before these things are always subjective to your own personal taste see what you reckon but I like that I reckon it looks good I don't want to darken that front wheel though and I'm gonna just go back on that that wheel I've have a thing about hubcaps I really like them to shine and even the wheel arch they're just that tiny little bit front bumper maybe just a touch you know I'm starting to get really fussy now so I better stop otherwise I'll be here all night all right so what do you think about that I like it now you can see I've got the original four layers plus I've got these two layers here which is just as justement layers I'm gonna flatten this whole image into one layer because it's a huge file size actually one thing I'll show you before I do that though is and I've showed you this plenty of times before if you want to do something with the sky color or add a bit of a touch of a color then go to photo filter and you can see what that's done it's after this this goal a little bit more gold and glow into that sky and you can change the amount of that by clicking on buttons here and and selecting different colors if you want I don't want it to look blue I like it the way it was with the gold ah boy that looks good I think having that touch of the gold and by the way that I think the sky everyone has a different opinion what color the sky is but the sky is all of these colors in my opinion when I and when I see this image I think they color just slightly adds to the warmth that's in the car itself there so this is just made now one other thing I will mention here on this image just before I finish here is you can see this beautiful light coming from the horizon up to the Milky Way that is called zodiacal light and that happens in October here in Australia when the Milky Way core is sitting like it is here now because the Sun hasn't been long set itself and it's there's excited particles or something a bit like I'm excited they're looking at it in the air here that will glow and they give this beautiful beautiful look and it's called the zodiacal light okay I'm gonna flatten this image now go to layer play image here we go all the edits are done and dusted I can't do anything more and a click out of Photoshop and go back to library all right now here we are in Lightroom now one of the things I'm going to do here is crop this image to sixteen by nine the reason I'm going to do that is because I think well I just did it I did it before I moved the car around a little bit there we go because I really like but there's a bit of dead sky up here the Milky Way was pretty low down in the sky and because of that I don't want too much dead sky if you if you want to call it dead sky ah do that looks good if the full screen and there we have our image and don't you think that looks absolutely awesome alright well there you go that image looks fantastic absolutely love it now you know a lot of you will probably be thinking I'll there's a few complicated steps that we had to do to get that final image but I can tell you the essence of this image is really quite simple and it comes down to how you plan the shoot out in the field now I think I've mentioned this quite a few times before but it is so important if you shoot and light your subject out in the field with the mindset of how you're going to edit those images when you get back here into the studio everything goes a whole lot smoother let me tell you that so that is the end of my current series on post-processing and there's been I think six or seven videos I really hope you've enjoyed it judging by the comments I've got on previous videos you have been enjoying it so thank you so much for that in the next few weeks well we're just about to the end of 2020 21 years at 2019 I've got a few things in the pipeline for 2020 already but one of the things I'm going to do is a Q&A video and so I'm hoping you guys can give me some questions I'd like to try and answer those and the reason I'm doing this video is simply because I get asked so many questions and I'm sure there's plenty of other people who would actually like to know the answers to what other people are asking me it's as simple as that have all the answers for everything and I don't profess to do so but some of the things that you'll ask me I might have some opinions on so anyway thanks so much for watching once again happy to read your comments down below and I'd love you to subscribe to the channel if you feel led to do so I've been so wrapped in the support that I've received this year 20:19 has been a huge year for nightscape images here on YouTube I've put together heaps of videos I've done heaps of trips and I'm looking forward to doing more so in 2020 so anyway until I see you again I'll see you guys later [Music]

Channel: Nightscape Images

Views: 26,699

Keywords: Nightscape Images, Milky Way editing, Milky way editing and blending, Light painting, light painting photography, Astrophotography, nightscape photography, night photography settings, night photography tutorial, night photography without flash, Milky way photography, milky way photography settings, How to photograph the milky way, learn milky way photography, Fine art light painting, night photography

Id: zy3GY019jI4

Length: 31min 40sec (1900 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 14 2019