Milky Way Photography With A Nifty Fifty Processing

[Music] hi i'm walt and this is delta astrophotography in my last video we learned how to take a photo of the milky way core with a nifty 50 50 millimeter lens you can see that video right up here well this is the follow-up video and we're gonna learn how to stack and process the images we took of the milky way we'll be doing everything on a windows computer but i hope some of you mac users can still follow along the software we will be using for stacking is sequitur and then processing in photoshop i'll also be using a few photoshop plugins most of which are free there is one paid one but to be honest you could just skip that step as a matter of fact any step you feel like skipping feel free to go ahead this tutorial is not for you to just learn my method and just stick to that it's just showing you some techniques that i use and hopefully you can use those in your own processing this video will show you how i got from beginning to end any software mentioned will be linked in the description below along with chapters so you can skip to any section you want to now before we started i might as well tell you what equipment i used so i used a stock canon 6d a canon 50 millimeter f 1.8 lens and an ioptron sky guider pro star tracker the settings i used were iso 800 aperture f4 and a shutter speed of 3 minutes or 180 seconds i took about 20 photos then put the lens cap on and took dark frames now if you did it completely different it doesn't matter this tutorial will still help you the exact same okay that's enough talking about it let's jump in the computer and start processing the milky way all right everybody here we are in sequitur uh if you don't already have this check out this website right here you can see it right up there go download you a copy now the first thing we're going to do is add our star images these are our light frames so i'm going to click on star images navigate to the folder where i had my light frames here we are i'm going to click on the first one hold shift and click on the last one ignore this last file right over here it's something i was working on earlier i'm just going to click open right it'll automatically choose a base image just one of the photos from in the middle to be a base to stack everything kind of based on that now we're going to select noise images these are our dark frames we took with the lens cap on i've got those in a separate folder called darks just ignore that too that's not supposed to be in here i'm going to click the first one hold shift click the last one hit open now the last thing we have to do is set where it's going to be saved so i'm going to click output i'm going to create a new folder [Music] 50 millimeter milk for youtube [Music] go in there and give the file a name it'll be the same name 50 millimeter milk for youtube now we'll come down here to accumulation right here click it come down and click select best pixels slide this slider all the way to the right to strict and that's it we just hit start and let it run and that's it it's done it only took 37 seconds check that out hit close now we've got our stacked image now we're going to close out a sequitur and open this file up in photoshop before we begin doing any editing we always want to create a copy so we won't destroy our original photo we'll do that by hitting ctrl j or command j on a mac there we go now we have a new layer we're going to work with that first thing we're going to do is brighten our image up a little bit it's a bit dark and i'm going to do that by hitting control m that would be probably command m on a mac and it brings up curves and all i'm going to do right here is go to this point right here with my mouse click and drag up don't drag too far you don't want any straight lines on the top here that's blowing out information that you will not get back so i'm going to pull that back down that's fine right here now some people will take the darks and and pull them down a little bit but i'll do that differently so i'm going to leave this alone just like it is i'm going to hit ok now i'm going to hit ctrl l or command l on a mac brings up levels i'm going to take the darks over here and slide them in towards the data spike right almost up to the edge of it about right there is good for me that brought out some contrast and hit ok let's look at before and after by turning this top layer off like this before after that's already looking great before after now each time we want to move on to a new step we're going to create a new layer so we can always go back and fix what we've done before if we don't like it instead of just duplicating the layer each time we're going to create a new stamp layer and we do that by hitting ctrl alt shift and e on the keyboard command option shift and e on a mac i'll explain later on while we do that instead of just hitting duplicate each time now i still think this image is a bit dark i want to brighten it some more but i don't want to make the stars too bright so i'm going to show you how to do that or at least this is one way to do it this is the way i prefer to do it lots of people do it differently but we're going to create a star mask so when we brighten the image it'll brighten everything but the stars we'll do that by hitting ctrl a and then ctrl c command a or command c on a mac we're just copying the image now i'm going to come down here to the bottom to this icon right here i'm going to click it and this is add layer mask now i'm going to come up to my layer mask and hold alt and click it again and just click the layer mask itself i'd probably hold option and click the layer mask this actually opens the layer mask and we'll hit ctrl v to paste the image in now we see a black and white version of our image inside the layer mask over here i'm going to invert it by hitting ctrl i or command i on a mac now you see everything that's black is not going to get affected when i start bringing up the levels again when i start making it brighter so i want the stars to be even blacker and i want some of this space to be even wider so we're going to fix that by hitting ctrl l to bring up levels again i'm going to bring the blacks up to make everything black even blacker i'm going to come to the opposite side over here on the right and bring that inward [Music] that's just getting rid of a lot of that dust in the milky way because i actually do want to get that brighter [Music] hit okay all right with we got the beginnings of our star mask we're going to blur our mask a little bit so it will be a little more natural looking when we start raising the brightness of everything else go up to the top to filter blur gaussian blur and we're just going to leave it around 4 pixels it should be enough hit ok now this is our star mask i'm going to click back on the actual layer now i've still got marching ants around the edges so i'm going to hit control d to deselect them command d on a mac and let's bring up curves again which is control or command m all right see this little hand this little finger icon right here i'm going to click that and it gives me a little dropper i'm going to come to a brighter spot in the milky way that i want to make even brighter click and hold and drag up there we go we're making that milky way core even brighter i'm going to click ok i want to create some more contrast so i'm going to hit ctrl l to bring up levels i'm going to pull this slider in right to the edge of the histogram or data right here [Music] and hit ok looking even better even more contrast and brightness create a new layer by hitting control alt shift and e altogether now i don't know if you can see this on your screen right now but i'm starting to get a little green cast it's kind of like in this area and a little bit over here and there's a plugin called hasta la vista green you can get it from this website right here and i'll also have a link to the description below but as you can see there's kind of a green cast in this picture and this is what it looks like after so we're going to use that so go ahead and get it downloaded and installed once it's installed all you have to do is go up to the top and hit filter come down to deep sky colors and here it is right here click it i just select strong because why not and hit ok there that green cast is gone completely let's look at before see a little green down here and after i'm going to create a new layer ctrl alt shift and e now the next step is kind of optional but it's something i really like to do and it's if you see down here at the bottom of the photo it's it's a lot brighter than it is up here and that's because of light pollution near the horizon honestly you could just skip this step if you don't have this plug-in but i have it so i'm going to use it it's one of the most amazing plugins that i've ever purchased it's called gradient exterminator here's the website where you would get that this plug-in does cost around 50 or 60 dollars but it's really worth it in the long run in my opinion once again you could probably skip this step if you don't have it that's fine but i'm going to show you how powerful it is we're going to get rid of this light pollution down here at the bottom first thing i want to do is come over here to my lasso tool select that and we're going to draw a circle right around the milky way just kind of select it like this try to just get the milky way in your circle and nothing else there we go now i'm going to come to select up here on the top and click inverse now everything but the milky way is selected so we're going to go up to filter down to rc astro and click gradient exterminator i'm just going to leave it on the default medium medium and hit ok i'm going to hit ctrl or command d deselect bring up levels ctrl l and just bring that back into the data a little bit there we go now you can see space is now a nice kind of dark color all throughout the photo it's not bright down here anymore unfortunately it brought a little bit of that green cast back it's it's barely noticeable but it's definitely back i can see it over here over here so i'm going to go ahead and run ostela vista green one more time filter deep sky colors i'll still vista green i'm going to hit okay now that looks great this is before i see a lot of light pollution down here and this is after we get a very balanced photo right now let's create a new layer ctrl alt shift and e now the next thing we're going to do is get rid of the stars we're going to separate the stars and the milky way so we can process them separately and then recombine them at the end i'm going to use a free program called starnet here's their website right here we're going to use the graphical user interface for windows you can also get a command line tool for windows mac and linux i do not know how to use the command line tool in mac so you'll probably have to look up a separate tutorial on how to do this on a mac i'm sorry so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to save this image save a copy so i'm going to go to file save as copy i'm going to title it 50 millimeter milk for star net i'm going to make sure layers is deselected i don't want to save the layers that's important we're going to save it as a tiff uncompressed hit save yeah compression none and hit okay now we're going to go into our starnet folder that we downloaded and click starnet gui i'm going to browse for the file that we just saved here we go open it up and for output i'm just going to change the name to 50 millimeter milk for starnet finished and that's really all i have to do i'm going to hit run and this process should take just a couple of minutes two or three minutes you can see how fast it's going right here if you have a slower computer yes it might take a little longer and it is done close all this out and go back to photoshop i'm going to go up to file and open and here's the finished file so i'm going to click that and click open and there's our starless image and it looks pretty cool in my opinion now before we move on let's go back and look at the other photo we were editing if you have a slower computer you might have to flatten this image because i've got all these layers right here to go back and work on previous things if you have a slow computer this might start bogging your computer down so you can always go to the top and go to layer flatten image now you won't be able to go back and work on any other parts of the photo but for this tutorial that's fine i'm going to go ahead and copy this again ctrl j command j on a mac you aren't actually able to use ctrl alt shift and e if it's your first background layer you have to hit ctrl j alright so now let's separate the stars from the starless image so we can have a stars only image so i'm going to copy this photo right here ctrl a and ctrl c so i can copy it come back over to the other folder we were working on i'm going to paste it in here by hitting ctrl v now let's rename our starless image starless that's very important make sure you do that now we're going to turn it off like this now let's click on the layer beneath it okay you see we got starless turned off and we are clicked on the layer beneath it i'm going to go up to image apply image and where it says layer i'm going to select starless that's why we had to rename it starla so we can see it in here starless go to blending and come down to subtract set our offset to around 2 right here and hit ok now we have a stars only image now we can process our stars and our starless image separately let's work on the stars only first i'm going to name this layer stars only first thing i'd want to fix i'm going to click on the zoom tool here i'm going to zoom in see there's a lot of purple around my stars that's called color fringing or chromatic aberration it's a problem with cheap lenses and telescopes when the red and the blue they just aren't focusing together properly and it's a pretty easy fix so we're going to go up to filter camera raw filter i'm going to zoom in you can do that by holding your left mouse button and it's kind of dragging left and right i just want to see the the kind of pink around some of these stars now on our camera raw filter we're going to come down to optics if the fringe isn't already open it should be down here like this just open that up come to purple amount and slide it up a bit until you see the pinkish purple around the stars go away that's it it's they're gone that's fine it was that easy we're gonna hit okay now i'm gonna shrink some of these stars just a bit that way when we add them back onto the milky way they won't be taking over the image the milky way will still pop some more so we're gonna shrink the stars by going to select color range and at the top instead of sampled colors we're going to choose highlights i'm going to move our fuzziness up and our range down until we see a lot of the stars selected hit okay i'm going to zoom in here and we can see the star is selected but it's very close to the star and i want just a little more than the star selected because we want to make sure we're affecting the whole star and not just like the center of it so i'm going to go to select modify expand i'm going to expand it by two pixels you see it's got a little the outer edge of the stars kind of it's not just the center of the star has kind of got the whole star selected here now we're going to feather it select modify feather since we expanded it by two we'll feather it by half of that which is one zoom back out and now let's just go to filter other minimum make sure preserve roundness is on we do not want preserve squareness we want roundness because our stars are round and i'm just going to um reduce them by you know 0.8 pixels sounds good i wouldn't go over one pixel you'll reduce them too much and you'll hardly see any stars in your photograph 0.8 sounds good i'm gonna hit ok i'm going to hit ctrl d to deselect that and see the stars are definitely dimmer and smaller now we can go back to working on our starless image so i'm going to click that make it visible again make sure our starless layer is selected now let's just go ahead and create a new layer ctrl alt shift and e next thing i'm going to want to do is just brighten this a little more let's bring up curves again i'm going to hit ctrl m command m on a mac click this little hand right here gives me a dropper and i'll put it in a area of the milky way that i want brighter click and hold and drag up [Music] it's looking good i can also click a darker area click and hold and drag down [Music] to create some contrast and hit ok before and after what we just did before after looking good again new layer ctrl alt shift and e now we're going to do some selective adjustments there's two different ways you can do it so i'll show you both and it's up to you to decide which one you want to do so for example maybe we want to just mess with the lagoon nebula and these nebulas over here the the eagle and the omega nebulas we're going to go up to select and color range and instead of highlights we're going to choose sampled colors it's going to give me a dropper here and i'm just going to click right in the lagoon nebula over here i'm going to adjust my fuzziness until [Music] some of the pink stuff is selected but not much else let's hit okay and try that that's okay that's okay but maybe i want a little more i'm gonna hit ctrl d to deselect that try again select color range [Music] it's still got my selection from before but i'm going to turn the fuzziness up a little more still not quite enough for me let's try it again select color range turn the fuzziness up even more there yeah i like that better all right let's just improve our selection some more by going to select select and mask i'm just going to hit contrast to make everything else darker [Music] feather it by about 10 pixels i can shift the edge out just a ton touch hit okay now from here we can go up to layer new adjustment layer and click vibrance or hue and saturation either one of those let's try vibrance and as you can see it made a little uh layer mask over here i'm going to hit alt and click on the layer mask and we can actually see what's going on in here you can see the widest areas are going to be affected the most by our vibrance adjustments but a lot of this stuff that i didn't want selected is still kind of bright so we're going to darken that by hitting ctrl l to bring up levels we're going to bring the blacks over until almost nothing is visible except those little pink areas i wanted to adjust there we go all right i'm gonna hit okay and click back over here now when we make our vibrance adjustments it's just gonna affect this area and these little areas right here and there we go we've made the lagoon and the other nebulas just a little more vibrant let's create a new layer by hitting ctrl alt shift and e now let's look at another way to selectively enhance colors in just certain areas i'm going to come over here to adjustments right here click that and find this one that looks like an envelope it's called selective color adjustments i'm going to click that i'm kind of wanting to adjust this area that's kind of an orangey so i guess that would fall under reds it's definitely not going to fall over under greens or cyans reds will probably be pretty good and i'm just going to mess with these faders right here i want too red but i do like it a little more orangey so i'm going to move that over just a little bit that looks awesome mess with the magenta see what that does i don't want to mess with that a whole lot try the yellows i didn't really like that what that did so i'm going to leave that alone too and that looks good enough all i had to adjust really was the cyan now i didn't really selectively adjust anything i actually adjusted the colors in the entire image so let me show you how to just adjust the areas that i want see it created a white mask right here for selective colors see that right there it's white right now we need to turn it black so make sure the mask is selected and hit control or command i to invert it now if you look you can't see the selective color adjustment anymore it's back to the way it was so we're going to go and grab our brush right here brush tool i'm going to change the opacity down to about 60 percent and we're gonna make sure the color of our brush is white and we do that right here we could select between black and white right there make sure it's white and we can adjust the size of the brush with our bracket keys on our keyboard if you don't have bracket keys on your keyboard you can also come up here right there and adjust your brush size here and we're just going to click around in the milky way on the areas that we want to enhance the color on just like this i'm doing click click click click click and we're just making the milky way itself a little bit more vibrant maybe the little piece of row of yuki over here in the corner as well [Music] and that's looking pretty cool we're going to come back over here to our mask and i'm going to hold alt or option and click it so we can actually see the mask and it's already looking kind of blurry but we can blur it a little more to make sure that it's as natural looking as possible by going filter blur gaussian blur and just adjusting this a little higher and 30 37 that looks fine with me click back over here okay so we have selectively changed the color of the milky way a little bit let's create a new layer ctrl alt shift and e command option shift and e on a mac now let's bring out some more detail in the dust of the milky way this is one of my favorite parts i'm going to use a tool called dodge and burn we're going to come over here it's right there it might be set to burn i don't know but it's it should be right there dodge is going to brighten the brighter areas that i tell it to and burn is going to darken the darker areas that i tell it to so we're going to click dodge first make sure the range is set to mid tones or highlights we're going to choose mid tones and set the exposure to a low number we're going to do about 12. just like earlier you can change your brush size with the bracket keys or clicking over here and changing your brush size there but i'm just going to find some brighter areas and just kind of click them and you'll see it makes it ever so slightly brighter be careful with this you can make it look really bad just kind of tap on a few brighter areas to make them even brighter just makes that inner core looks like it's glowing now we'll come back over to our dodge tool and right click it and select burn now we're going to do the same thing make sure range is on shadows for burn and the exposure make it even lower we're gonna do six percent and we're going to click on some darker areas see that that dust down here we're gonna make that even darker see that kind of brings it out makes the dust really stand out once again don't go too crazy with this because it can start to look really bad really fast so i think i'm going to probably stop right about here that's enough i'm going to hit ctrl alt shift and e to create a new layer oh one thing i forgot to explain earlier is why we use ctrl alt shift and e instead of just duplicate let's say we're working on this layer right here and i've got a layer mask that layer mask is interacting with the layer below it if i was to just duplicate this layer and move on all i would do is duplicate this and none of this down here ctrl alt shift and e pretty much takes every single layer and kind of combines it into one layer on the very top and so that's why we use ctrl alt shift and e instead of duplicate anyway let's do some final adjustments shall we we're going to go up to filter camera raw filter and we're going to do some final adjustments click up here on our basic tab let's bring the exposure up just a little more brighten it up a bit increase the contrast you can bring down the blacks just to touch i'm going to increase my clarity just a little bit not too much i mean it kind of looks cool but it also makes it very noisy increase my clarity and my dehaze just a touch there i can add a touch more vibrance maybe a touch of saturation i don't want to go too much because i've noticed that if i add a lot of vibrance and saturation my background space colors when i look at the image on my phone they kind of look green and space is not supposed to be green so that's why i don't really mess with these too much we've already made the actual core more vibrant so no need to add a lot at the end here now i'm gonna go down to detail because we're gonna do a little noise reduction it's a little noisy in there so i'm just going to turn up my color noise reduction and then just regular noise reduction if you go too crazy it'll make your image very soft so let's try not to go over you know 30 if we can help it but that's a good amount of noise reduction see we had a lot of noise here bring it up to about right there i think that's good zoom back out let's add a little sharpening [Music] and we're gonna hit okay and that's looking pretty good now add one more camera raw filter we're just gonna go back up to basic we're gonna add a touch more clarity touch more dehaze and a touch more noise reduction and hit okay now we're about done let's add a new layer ctrl alt shift and e command option shift an e on a mac and let's go down here and find our stars only layer there it is let's drag it all the way to the top cooperate with me please [Music] all right i've got it on the top let's change our blending mode from normal to screen there we go we got our stars back because they're smaller we can really see the milky way pop if we wanted to create another layer see screen right there is kind of highlighted in blue you'd have to hit escape and then control alt shift and e and let's just do you know one final camera raw filter maybe a little contrast you know that's really all i'm gonna do here to be honest i'm gonna hit okay i'm gonna go over here to my crop tool this is it right here i'm just gonna kind of crop a little bit we've got some bad corners over here i like to make sure original ratio is checked when i crop and once i get it cropped like i like it i'll hit enter and there we have it guys that is our final image of the milky way core with a nifty 50. so i hope you learned some new techniques at the very least i hope you didn't stab your monitor with a fork if i could give you any more advice is when you're out taking photographs try to remember to take as many as possible for your stack because the more you include in your stack the cleaner your image is and the more fun and easy it's going to be to process if you liked anything you saw here please give me a like and subscribe to this channel because we always have a good time here at delta astrophotography well got to go for now as always stay spacey clear skies everybody and good night [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Delta Astrophotography

Views: 8,846

Keywords: Milky Way, Milky Way Photography, Nifty Fifty, 50mm, Milky Way 50mm, Milky Way Photoshop, Milky Way 50mm Photoshop, Milky Way Nifty Fifty Photoshop

Id: Z4D9R0S-iOQ

Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2022