Noise-Free Astrophotography with Starry Landscape Stacker (macOS)

[Music] hey everyone I'm here Norman from lonely speck and today I want to talk about post-processing you're probably familiar with some of my other youtube videos where I talk about some different methods that I use for astrophotography that involve a method of image stacking where we basically take multiple exposures of the night sky and then we stack those together in post-processing in order to reduce noise and increase our image quality there's a couple different ways that I've shown how a stack photos in the past one of those is using Adobe Photoshop to automatically align our images together when we're shooting astrophotos we have to deal with the rotation of the earth so the stars appear to move across the sky over the course of the night and that makes for alignment issues when we're trying to process our photos and Adobe Photoshop is one of the tools that I still use fairly often but it's not always the best at aligning photos especially when you're using a wide-angle lens if it's a really ultra wide-angle lens the rectilinear distortion of the lens tends to really kind of mess up photoshop in terms of how well it can align those photos so one of the other methods that I talked about in one of my other videos is a manual alignment procedure and well it's pretty much guaranteed to work every time since you're going in and manually aligning each exposure it's an extremely time-consuming process so I wanted to go over a different piece of software that is super helpful for aligning your Astra photo exposures for stacking and that piece of software is called sorry landscape stacker and I started using sorry landscape stacker and pretty much all of my stock images with the latest iteration of the software it does a much better job at name aligning astrophotos especially those made with a super wide angle lens so I just wanted to give you a quick overview of how I use starry landscapes Packer on a very basic light frame stack of astrophotography exposures and that should give you a good idea of how the program is used and how quick it can be for processing a stack of astrophotos okay so to start us off i'm going to go ahead and show you guys the exposures that i took for this demonstration I have here 19 separate exposures that I made these were shot in Alabama hills near Lone Pine California this is one of my favorite spots to photograph the Milky Way it's right at the base of the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains this is a relatively simple composition this was made right at the end of the night of my shooting just as the moon was rising and you can see that it's colored the sky relatively blue but one of the things I really love about this shot is that it has some moonlight hitting the mountains and I think that's kind of what makes this shot special for me so this photograph was taken with the sony a7s and the zeiss batis 18 millimeter F 2.8 lens this is sort of my go-to wide-angle landscape setup and like I said I captured 19 separate images so if I scroll through these images relatively quickly we can see that the sky's shifts just a little bit between each exposure so it's sort of like I have like a very short time lapse so one of the challenges we have with stacking these sets of images is that we have to align sky together so my very first step when approaching in astrophotos stack is to open up the very first image and we're going to do some very basic edits on the photograph so I'm going to go ahead and go into the develop module here by clicking develop you can also press D on the keyboard and there's a few things that I just want to check before we make the stack one of the first and foremost things to do is sort of give your image a relatively balanced exposure we do this so that it's relatively easy to see what's going on so it might be good to make some adjustments maybe brighten up your exposure a little bit if necessary just so you can see some details in the foreground as well as in the sky I actually like the exposure as it is straight out of the camera it was shot at a relatively high ISO of 12,800 with a 15 second exposure at F 2.8 so this is a relatively bright image plus we had a little bit of the moonlight in there so you know that kept this exposure relatively bright if you're working with an exposure that starts off a little bit darker than this it's okay just bump up the exposure slider just a little bit so I'm going to actually scroll down relatively quickly here we're not going to edit any of these basic adjustments just yet we're going to end up doing a stack first so the one thing that I want to look at is this detail toolbar so something that I think is relatively important when doing an Astra photo stack is to make sure that you've disabled any kind of color noise reduction by default Lightroom sets color noise reduction typically to about 25% and this can usually help a lot with a single frame but the problem with using color noise reduction on a stack of multiple exposures is that it ends up sort of hiding some of the more detailed colored data in the image so we sort of expect some of these little nebula details to be pink and if we enable color noise reduction some of that pink color goes away and we want to retain some of the natural colors that we should expect in the night sky so by enabling color noise reduction we're losing some of those natural colors so we want to go ahead and disable that entirely and as you can see you know this note this image is relatively noisy you can see some hot pixels here and there foreground you know has a whole bunch of red green and blue color noise and you know it's grainy it's not a terrible exposure but the grain is definitely visible there so once we've disabled our color noise reduction we're basically ready to go ahead and process this as an image stack so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and go back to my library grid view and we can also do this by pressing G and I'm just going to make sure that I have all of my exposures selected and then I'm going to select and make sure that that first exposure where I disabled the color noise reduction is selected it's a little bit lighter than the rest of these and then I'm going to click sync settings and sync settings will just allow us to make sure that any exposure adjustments or that color noise reduction adjustment that we made are synchronized perfectly between all of our exposures so they look exactly the same so click synchronize that'll paste all of the settings to all of the other exposures and then we're ready to export our photographs okay so we still have all of these images selected so we're ready to export them so that we can import them into starry landscape stacker so I'm going to go over to the Left toolbar here and click the export button we can go ahead and export this to just a folder on my desktop I have one called starry landscape soccer demo not going to rename the files or anything but I do want to make sure that my file settings are set to tip and then prophoto RGB which allows us to do a 16-bit depth color on our image files I'm going to go head and use no compression just so that the work flows a little bit faster and I'm making sure that I'm not resizing my image at all I'm not applying any sort of sharpening to it we do want to make sure that we are retaining our metadata sorry landscape lacquer actually uses the time stamp of your images to help it do the stacking so make sure that you're retaining all of your metadata when you're export and that's basically it so I'll go ahead and click export and we'll let Lightroom do its thing for exporting these 19 images okay so once you have all of your photographs exported you can see I have them all here as Tiff's we go ahead and open up starry landscape stacker so starting landscape stacker is available for Mac OS and it's unfortunately not available for Windows at this time and that's unfortunate because it's really really good at what it does I know a couple photographers who work on Windows computers who have actually bought a Mac Mini specifically to be able to run starry landscapes Packer I probably wouldn't recommend running out to buy an entirely new computer just to use this program but it really is quite good it's very very fast and it's very very simple to use and like I said I use it now for pretty much all of my stacked exposures the latest version of the software is good enough that I almost never have to go into Adobe Photoshop in order to do a manual stack anymore and for that reason I really do think that it's worth the purchase price so when you first open started landscape slacker you're met with this very simple interface and it prompts you immediately for the files that you want to open into your stack so I'm going to go ahead and select the folder that we have on our desktop with all of my sample images and I'm going to highlight all the images with a shift click and click open start landscape stacker supports different types of frames and it automatically recognized these as light frames it also supports dark frames and flat frames as well as custom masks but this is a very basic stack of just nineteen regular exposures when it opens up this stack you can see that it automatically tries to find all of the stars in the image and it's showing us a composite image right now as if we stack the image without any sort of alignment and I think starry landscape stacker tends to look for the stars in one of the center images in your frame and you sort of uses that as the base for stacking all of the other frames together with it as you can see it's detected most of these stars and if there are areas where starry landscapes Decker has very obviously missed stars portions of the sky where you expect there to be stars it gives us this little red dot tool which allows us to manually add stars that it might recognize and if you look closely down here you can actually see that starry landscape stacker this took a hot pixel for a star and so for that reason I'm going to go ahead and switch this tool from add red dots to remove red dots and that allows us to erase any areas where starry landscape Packer may have been taken say a hot pixel forest star so now we have our image such that most of the stars are detected so we're going to go ahead and allow starry landscape stacker to automatically find the sky by just clicking the fine sky button and that will automatically try to detect the horizon line and create a mask so that program knows what's the foreground and what is the sky and as you can see it did a relatively good job here I see a few areas where it may have over mask some of the sky on to the foreground so I'm going to go ahead and click this zoom actual pixel button and we're going to zoom in and I'm going to use the spacebar to get the hand grabber and just sort of drag along and take a look at our foreground and make sure that it looks like the mask is carefully following the foreground you can see there's a little area right here where some of my mountains is getting masked blue so I'm going to go ahead and use a smaller brush here you can use the same hotkey that you would use in Photoshop in starry landscapes a car in terms of just basic brush tools so I can make a smaller brush by clicking the open bracket so go ahead and make that brush smaller and it looks like we're painting the mask here so we can go ahead and switch our paint from the sky to the ground so I'll do that and then we'll go ahead and make our small adjustments so let's let the mask follows the foreground perfectly and we'll just go ahead and check the rest of our foreground here and look for areas where the sky may be encroaching upon the foreground looking pretty good so far click there's a couple areas right here where it seems to be encroaching upon foreground so go ahead and make those tweaks okay so that's looking pretty good so now that we have the sky perfectly masked we're ready to click align and save and sorry landscape stacker will take just a minute to align all the stars in the sky and I believe it uses a standard meeting filter for doing this stack and that should reduce most of the random noise in our photograph okay so when it finishes the alignment it prompts us with how we want to save our file I'm going to go ahead and call this SLS demo and click the Save button and it shows us the result of our final stack okay so I'm going to go ahead and pull that image really quickly into Adobe Lightroom and I'm going to go ahead and select our final composite image and one of our single frame exposures and press C to compare each of them and let's just zoom in really quickly to sort of get an idea of what our stack ended up doing to our photograph so our final composite is on the left and as you can see there's a really great production of noise in the final image it just looks significantly cleaner than our single frame if we look at the foreground the foreground is also cleaned up quite a bit but there still is the presence of some fixed pattern noise in the photograph and I'm just going to show you real quickly how I tend to deal with that fixed pattern noise what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and open up our composite image in Adobe Photoshop so I'll go ahead right-click click Edit in Adobe Photoshop CC and I'm going to go ahead and edit that original composite tip that I created okay so here's our photograph in Photoshop and so well starry landscape stacker did a really good job at almost completely eliminating noise in the sky of her photograph it we still have this fixed pattern noise in foreground so these noisy pixels are pixels that didn't change between any of our exposures there's a couple ways to reduce 6 pattern noise and one of those is by taking dark frames or enabling long exposure noise reduction on your camera sorry landscape stacker does support dark frames now I was shooting on a relatively warm night and really warm conditions can contribute greatly to the amount of fixed pattern noise that you end up is in your photographs so I would just want to show you a quick way of how I get rid of it without having to take any sort of dark rain so the first thing that I'm going to do since this only affects the foreground is to create a selection of my foreground so I'm going to use this quick selection tool you can also get to it by pressing W and I'm just going to very quickly with a large brush highlight my entire foreground and Photoshop tends to do a really good job at automatically selecting objects with the quick selection tool and I'm just going to go zoom in and kind of refine my selection just a little bit it really doesn't need to be perfect we just want to make sure that we're selecting all the areas that have the problems with 6 pattern noise so after that's selected we're going to use a filter called dust and scratches which we can find under filter and then noise and then dust and scratches and I'm going to go ahead and zoom in here so we can sort of see the result larger and the way dust and scratches works is it looks for relatively bright pixels I'm going to go ahead and turn the threshold down here we'll go ahead and start it at one radius you can see that at its lowest settings here it's sort of muddies up the look of the image what we want to look for is how it's affecting those hot pixels so you can see if I turn the preview on and off we can see that it's trying to remove most of those hot pixels and we want to first start by adjusting the radius just so that most of those hot pixels are completely invisible so once I get to a radius of about two pixels most of them start to go away we still have a few of the really large hot pixels present so maybe three or four pixels is a little more appropriate but as you can see that really gives the foreground a very painterly and blurry look so we're going to compensate with that by increasing threshold so this basically tells the filter to look for sort of a more precise number of pixels if we increase the threshold too much you can see that it basically turns off the filter so we're looking at sort of a happy medium where most of the hot pixels are not visible but we still have a fair amount of detail in the foreground I don't mind a little bit of color model in the image a little bit of grain we can always do some last-minute tweaks to that image to sort of clean it up just a little bit more so if I go ahead and do a final toggle on the preview here most of the hot pixels disappear with the filter enabled and most of the detail that I had in the original image is retained it doesn't really seem to affect the actual detail that I want in the image so I'm pretty happy with a settings radius of three pixels and a threshold of 13 levels so I'm going to go ahead and click ok so now we've cleaned up most of that image I can go ahead and deselect my selection there with command D or control D on the keyboard I'm happy with that adjustment so I'm going to go ahead and save my image just with command S or ctrl s and then we can switch right back to Adobe Lightroom and now in Adobe Lightroom we've got our final image it's corrected for both noise in the sky and noise in the foreground so now we're ready to do our final tweaks on the image using the Adobe Lightroom develop module the first thing I'm going to do is in relation to some of that last little bit of noise that's present in our photograph so now that we've removed most of the color noise in the image it's a little bit safer to use this color noise reduction in Adobe Lightroom so I'm going to go ahead and bring that up just a little bit maybe to about 10 to 15 percent or so just so that some of that color noise in the foreground gets greatly reduced now we have a photograph that's really really clean looking there's no color noise in it whatsoever the sky is relatively detailed and we've retained a lot of color in the nebula and image and so now it's ready for some final tweak I'm just going to really quickly do some really slight adjustments to this image I'm going to add a graduated filter here just to even the foreground with a sky a little bit and then I'm going to kind of tweak the contrast of the image give us a little bit more contrast just to make the image a little bit more dramatic I'm going to warm up the image just slightly just because we're getting a little bit of glue from the moonlight I want to make sure that I'm still maintaining a fair bit of shadow detail in the foreground so I'm going to increase the levels on the shadows and the blacks just a little bit and if we want to give the night sky just a little bit more punch we can increase the clarity I'm just going to do just a real real small amount just about 10% or so and this photograph was shot in RAW so it's a little bit subdued right now so a little bit of vibrance and saturation should help so those are some basic tweaks that we can make to the photograph if you want a better overview of how I process photos in Adobe Lightroom check out my tutorial on basic Milkyway processing and Adobe Lightroom so to finish off the demo and the computer here I want to give one last comparison of our final image with the single frame as you can see the final image on the left and the single frame on the right great greatly reduced noise improved detail and the foreground things like the crack in this rock here are significantly more visible the detail in the bushes and the foreground are also more visible noise is greatly reduced it's just a significantly better looking photograph and it still maintains the of being a single exposure just with greatly reduced noise okay so that's my overview of sorry landscape soccer as you can see it's pretty quick to use and it's refined specifically for astrophotography it's available on the Mac App Store check it out there if you have any questions related to astrophotography please feel free to add those in the comments below and check out all of our reviews and tutorials and inspiration on-loan expect calm see ya you

Channel: Lonely Speck

Views: 120,808

Keywords: astrophotography, photography, how to, nightscapes, starry landscape stacker, lightroom, milky way, noise reduction

Id: AQOfTTGWEDo

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2017