Nightscape Light Painting Star Trails

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] I've been listening to the feedback coming through from my recent vlogs and so I've decided to do a number of videos specifically relating to my like painting capture process as well as that I'll also walk you through the editing process from start to finish on each of these some of the night scapes I'll be shooting will be quite simple in nature while others may be a little more complex but the process is pretty much always the same alright now first up we're going to be shooting this little old Austin a30 and my plan for tonight is to shoot start trials now incorporated with the start trials I'm going to shoot some light painting frames and I'm gonna do my fine art light painting method now this is something I do a lot and for this little old girl I reckon it will come up quite well okay so here we go I've got the camera set up on the tripod as you can see very low down to the ground now the reason that I've done that is because I want to maximize the amount of open sky behind the Austin here and if I didn't do that then there's no there's some trees down in the background the Austin could get lost a little bit with that silhouette of the trees in the background so that's my plan so what I'm doing I'm using a nikon d750 and I've got the Sigma 35 millimeter art F 1.4 lens a little bit unusual to be shooting star trails with the longer lens like a 35 millimeter but I want to try something a little bit different tonight the first thing I'll be doing is setting focus so I'll be putting the live view screen on and focusing on the stars in the background so I'm zooming in using a live view screen at the back when I see some stars I can turn the zoom ring until they're in focus which I can see there you won't probably see that I don't think on the screen but I can see that and zoom back out again simple as that with this camera and lens accommodation it's really easy to find focus then my method is to once I found focus is actually to frame up as you can see the car framed up now where I want it to be so that's the sequence of events now I'm going to enter the settings into the intervalometer but before I do that I want to enter the settings into the camera I've decided to make the aperture F two point eight now the shutter speed is obviously going to be set to bulb because I'm going to be taking a number of exposures and the ISO I'm going to set that down to 640 so that's the camera settings now let's look at the intervalometer okay the settings on the intervalometer so firstly I'm going to have a two-second delay at the beginning then I'm going to set the how long I want the shutter speed to be open now for me I'm going to set this at three minute exposures because I like that particular setting for my start trials and I'm going to shoot a number of them something a little bit different tonight what I'm going to do and I'll show you in just a moment I'll by the way the interval here this is going to be set at the very shortest possible and that's one second I can't go any less than that but I'm going to set it at one second into what seat one second between each shot now it's going to ask me here what I want to enter in as far as the number of shots there normally I would set a number such as one two three four five but for this time I'm going to set it at these horizontal dots which means it will just keep going until I'm finished now that's a little bit unusual so that could go for an hour it could go for two hours I'm just going to leave it running and see what happens so that what that means is it's going to be shooting three men's exposures with one second delay between each shot at F 2.8 at ISO 650 until I actually come back and press the stop button on the intervalometer so that's a little bit different what I normally do so essentially what I'm doing is longer star trails than normal so let's get into it I've shot this little Austin heaps of times before but never exactly like this using the longer focal length lens to capture star trails so after the star trails have been captured I'll get onto the light painting process being careful to not move the camera or tripod all right here we go so we've got our star trails and that's taken quite a while it's been shooting up here now what we're going to do is turn our attention to light painting the little old Austin so I'm going to show you how I do that so let's get into it now okay now one of the other things I'm going to do is put a light inside the car and you'll notice this light it's a low-level light this is a z96 video light with an orange gel on the front the orange gel is just going to warm up the interior of the car and hopefully show off the gorgeous Moss that's all over the front of this so I'm going to play set discreetly down here on the front seat and leave it there and see here we go so my method of light painting is to get on the sides away from the angle of the camera never light paint from the same angle as a camera and when I'm doing this I'm releasing the shutter with a remote release which is in my pocket so I can do it from a distance from the camera [Music] so I'm watching from the back lighting from the sides and then I'm gonna like from the front and sweep the light across the front of the car I'm looking for shadow and shape I don't want flat light so what I'm not going to do is light from the same angle as the camera as I said because what that does is creates very harsh flat lifeless light sometimes I like to light up some detail like the wheels here again I'm off on an angle doing it depends how much grasses are in there's not much grass here at the moment okay now here we go this is a question I get asked more than any other I guarantee it and that is what is the orange gel on the front of my torch so what it is is a half CTO gel CTO means color temperature orange and the reason I have that gel on there is because I set my white balance in camera a little bit cooler and for this of start trial I'm going to set it at about thirty five seventy Kelvin the reason I do that is to get a little bit bluer sky color in the background now people said to me all the time well why don't you just adjust at all in Lightroom because shooting in RAW it's easy to adjust the white balance yeah sure I can do that but whenever I'm doing light painting and I'm trying to blend for grounds and backgrounds together especially when I'm doing a single shot which I'm not doing in this case but when I do a single shot it's far easier to balance the color out when you're shooting in the field so that's what I do and all I've done is taped it on the front of the torch with black electrical tape now I don't know if you can see this but I've got a little piece of it right here that's transparent half CTO gel and in Australia the part number for this is 205 okay and I bought this on a shoe that's all I've got left just there's a few inches of it but it was a sheet a massive size and I've just cut progressively I keep giving it away to people that's why I haven't got any left but that's what it is 2:05 half CTO gel okay well I think the capture process is complete let's get back to the editing room to have a look at what we've got here okay well here we are back in the studio ready to have a look at the post-processing of these start trials now before we get started full disclosure when I got home last night I was pretty tired but I had a quick look at the images I took and lo and behold I found out that somehow I must have bumped the tripod between the start trial shots and the light painted four grand shots so that causes me a whole lot of headaches and I was almost at the point of totally cancelling this video and having to go ahead and reshoot the whole thing again but I think I've recovered it and I've done a bit of work with aligning the layers up this is not ideal and it's not really something that I want you guys to have to go through so I'm going to skip over a lot of that because it'll just be too long if I try and explain all of those steps so I'm going to try and show you how it all works without having to go through the bother of going through all those details so let's have a look and see how we go okay well welcome to Lightroom I've got it opened already because I'm trying to save a lot of time with this video and you can see it in the bottom at the beginning here I've got one two three four five six these are the light painted layers and you can see one there on the screen over here on the all of these ones that are selected down the bottom here there's actually 77 exposures four start trials now that's way more than I normally do you can see they go all the way to here and I've probably got a little bit carried away last night and and that's the problem with that caused the problem I think with moving the tripod and getting these other layers out of alignment but never mind so I took 77 3 minute exposures and that's a total of 3 and 3/4 hours worth of start trials so I've got them all highlighted so my next step before I do that if you have a look here you can see the adjustments I've made here in Lightroom pretty basic adjustments really just a little bit of extra exposure drop the highlights of fraction edits and whites for the foreground layers here I've added some clarity which I didn't do for the start trail images and the only other thing I've done is added as you can see here profile Corrections lens Corrections and noise reduction so I've put some noise reduction either all of those images here in Lightroom and so far that's all I'm going to do so the next step whilst all of those images are highlighter you can see that all the ones that are highlighted I just right-click on one of them go up to this little tab here that says edit in go right down here where it says open as layers in Photoshop so we click on that and then a Photoshop will open now I've saved you guys a whole lot of time because that took about 20 minutes to open on my computer and that's the reason for that is because there were so many layers I normally don't have so many layers you can see all the layers listed over here and because of 77 start trials you know they're pretty large files they're all raw file so there's a fair bit of processing happening here all right now because of the fact that I kicked my tripod last night which is very unfortunate I've had to do some work already on these foreground layers and line them all up and you can see that the if you look at the side of the frame here you can see that the software's been doing a bit of work just to just to level everything up so I'm not going to take you through all that it's way too time-consuming and boring but you can see here one two three four five six there the layers that I've worked on the foreground like painted layers and I've already added layer masks onto and both got them turned off at the moment so you can't see what's going on apart from that the layers underneath you can see all of these ones down here they're all the start trials so all of those start trials now to make this work what I'm going to do is I'll just show you what I've done with these lame-ass I'm just going to enable all these layer masks by right-clicking on them and you can see what's happening here you can start to see over here that the the like painting etc the things that I've I've been working on and you can see there behind the first of the start trial layers its underneath but the thing that you will notice mostly is just how untidy this is around here I've done a really rough mask and that's what these layer layer masks are here what I did I just got a layer mask added a layer mask to to these top layers and then went over here to these little black and white it's added a brush tool here and then when you select the brush tool you go up here to the size of the brush and the hardness of the brush so the soft brushes and hard brushes but just say for example I wanted a hard brush I click on there and you can see the brushes is selected here in the different sizes you can see make it a small brush or a large brush depending on what you're trying to do so I've already done that and the reason for that is because I just needed to save time but what I basically done is just painted as close in around there as I can don't have to be perfect to you as you can see it's rough around the edges the magic happens when I turn all of these layers into light and blend mode so I'm going to do that now I'm just gonna make that lighten and you can see they start to appear each layer it starts to appear through the layer that's on top of it lighten I'm just going through them one at a time I can do this quicker than this but I'm showing you I don't really lose you with all of these steps and you can see now that the car is beginning to actually look like a car so now I've got those those layers are all blended with the light and blending mode and you can see here now around the top of the car is smooth and very very clean now i've off on that quite amazing how it worked but it's just a simple blend mode in photoshop now what i'm going to do is enable all of these star trail layers as a light and blend mode as well so currently what you're looking at here is simply one of the layers it's this top layer here and because it's it's got a normal let me just click on it when i click on that layer the blend mode up here says norm because it's normal you can't see through it so we sing through all of these ones too what's underneath because I've cut out the sky and there you can see that but once I enable all of these layers underneath and make them the blend mode lighten and I'll just do it with a few of them just to show you what it does and we can build on it so I'll just grab there's about ten layers there so I can change them all together and show you change that to lighten and immediately you can see start trails appear why is that because I've enabled those ten as a lighten blend mode you can actually see through the dark parts of the image and only see the light parts of the image of course the stars are the light part of the image now as I say that I had about 70 of these so what I'm going to do is enable all of the rest and show you what it looks like with with 77 background layers so there you go I've just hold down shift on the keyboard and clicked on that and it's selected all of those layers go up here where it says normal and go down to the one that says lighten and you'll see how see how they extended so that is three and three-quarter hours worth of star trails and it's quite amazing isn't it just what it can look like with so many layers and I think it looks fantastic just having one or two layers you see the small amount of star trail but with a lot of layers like this you see it looks really unworldly it's it's out of this world it looks fantastic so in a nutshell what I've done I've blended 77 star trial layers together remember there were three minute exposures at ISO 650 the if 2.8 was the aperture so they were all blended together there and then after that a light planted separately the layers onto the car and there's five of them here you can see the different layers and when I turn each layer off you'll see bits of it that disappear see how computer slowing down a bit that's why it's just taking so long to actually but you see have bits disappear and other Pizza bits appear he said clearly that orange light I put inside the car there so isn't that isn't that great how you can see things appear that have been painted in with light now with the layer masks themselves you can experiment with how much you want to paint out of certain layers simply by clicking on the layer mask going over to your brush and just getting it and painting over it and if you think you've done you've gone too far with the painting something out just click over here onto this little arrow and it turns up to white and click back over it again and it just changes it back to where it was before so it's a non-destructive workflow which is one of the things I love about using layer masks in Photoshop by the way up here if you look at the opacity of the layer of the brush you can change that to 100% or whatever percentage you would prefer to use now there are other pieces of software that layer start rails start stacks is a great example it's a free piece of software does a really good job and it actually does use the light and blend mode but it's all automated and built-in so what I have done by taking these separate layers of the light painted for brand I was able to change the focus in the aperture as I mentioned and make the the foreground part of the image really sharp and crisp now you can't do that in statistics so that's why I had to come into Photoshop the other thing you can't do in star stacks is and they will layer masks like this and you can't see it here now but when that layer mask was all of these layers were in there there was some faint stars in the sky and I rubbed them out because I didn't want random dots in my sky I want it to look like this so I'm wrapped with how this looks now one thing you can do and I'll briefly show you is I can grab all those sky layers and here we go I'll just do it by holding down shift on the keyboard and selecting them all okay so you can see what I've done here I've selected all of the star try layers and now all I have to do is simply drag them down to this little box down the bottom which creates a group okay you can see they have all but put into a group if you open that little arrow you can see that there's all of the separate layers are in there so the thing I'm going to do now is add curves adjustment layer on that group so it's not affecting anything that's above it it's just a victim what's under it which is all of the star trials now I'm just going to put a really simple little S curve here and you can see what happens when you drag down you create this this contrast curve so you've got just that little bit of extra dynamics in the image there and it's sort of giving it a little bit more punch I think take the curves layer out and it takes it back to where it was put the curves layer back in and you can see that it's got that little bit extra punch to the shot and I think I like it better with just that little bit of extra punch okay so now that we've finished all the editing that's required here this is a massive file size and I really don't want to save that file size that large so I'm going to flatten the image here you might cringe when you see me do this but I just did it that's too late now that's one layer it's gone back to 143 megabytes which is very manageable I would suggest if you want to do very editing later if you're not certain just save it as a PSD file and you can come back in and open up in Photoshop anytime you want but for the purpose of my illustration my exercise I've got so many large files on my computer is just too big so I'm making a cross out of Photoshop it's asking me if I want to say but I'll say yes and what that will do now is open up this image is complete edited Photoshop image back in Lightroom you can see it's it's put it at the end of that stack that I had there before so once I get this back in the Lightroom I can do a few things with the image that need doing for example cropping these corners I'd much prefer Lightroom's cropping tools to photo shops so what I'm just going to do is get rid of those edges like so okay maintaining the aspect ratio so I'm just basically getting it so that I'm not losing too much of the image there we go crop it out Bob's your uncle I like that one of the things I sometimes do is darken with the gradient tool here you can see what I'm doing it's just creating a little darker corner so I'll do it here just to show you this I've done this on a lot of my videos I guess that's just one of my signature parts of my editing workflow if I press if on the keyboard now you can see what it looks like full screen very clean image if you look at the front of this car crisp as anything Stars sharp there's no noisy this image is a lot of images layered for grain grass all looks fantastic so I'm really pleased with that and that's how we edit this image in both Lightroom and Photoshop if you really didn't want so many layers you wouldn't have to edit all seventy-seven oh sure I never really shoot that many and why did I last night I don't know I was just felt adventurous but you could that you could do 20 you could do 30 you could do 10 it doesn't matter the point being this is the process and I'm very pleased with hair that's come up so what are your thoughts on the edited image I'm always really keen to hear what you guys have got to say so I'm happy for you to leave a comment below and I'm always keen to answer any questions that you might have if you'd like to subscribe to the channel I'd be delighted to have you on board if you click on the bell next to the subscription logo down the bottom you'll be notified when new materials are played once again I thank you for joining me I really do appreciate that so I'll look forward to seeing you guys soon [Music] [Music]

Channel: Nightscape Images

Views: 29,790

Keywords: Nightscape Images, Astrophotography, Milky Way, Light Painting, Star Trails, Long Exposure Photography, Stars, Night Photography, Milky Way Editing, Under the Stars, Night Landscape Photography, Landscape Photography, Photography Vlog, Milky Way Vlog, Photography Roadtrip

Id: uyAM8Ut0RwU

Length: 24min 35sec (1475 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 11 2019