Photo Jack

[Emerenciana Mcgreal]

Photographerliving the adventurous life with my wife and daughter. Connoisseur of Type II Fun. Often alone in the woods at night. Based in Bothell, Washington (just outside of Seattle), but I travel often.

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For this article, I'm going to walk you through my post-processing workflow for a Milky Way photo done as a single shot, with no stacking, tracking, or blending (I'll cover those later). This is the most common type of Milky Way photo because it's really easy and accessible - just point, shoot, and process. Even for those that are familiar with some of the more advanced techniques, single-shot photos can still be really useful in some situations. It's also a great foundational place to start before learning the more advanced techniques.

The process I'm going to present is only one way to process this photo. If you're new to processing night sky photos, this will hopefully be a good place to start building your own workflow. If you've been doing this a while, you might completely disagree with how I do this, or you might not and might take a tip or two away. Most likely you'll be somewhere in-between.

The point I'm trying to make is that everyone will process night sky differently according to his or her own artistic vision. There's no right or wrong way. You should feel free to modify some or all of these steps to suit your own preferences and vision. In fact, I think you'll find that your results are better if you are invested in what you are doing, so please take this and make it your own!

You might be wondering why I'm using both Lightroom and Photoshop. A lot of this is a workflow preference thing. I like using Lightroom to organize photos and do basic RAW processing, and Photoshop to do the heavy-lifting. You can certainly post-process night sky shots in one or the other, but I find Photoshop to be a lot more flexible for my needs, especially since night sky usually requires a lot of post-processing steps.

The very first thing we're going to do is load up this photo into Lightroom and take a look to see what we have. I think it's important to assess every photo before processing it so I can get an idea of what needs work. No two photos are alike, after all, and I always find it best to try to do the least amount of work I can to a photo.

After getting the image into Lightroom, the first thing I always do is fix the white balance. White balancing and color grading night sky images is a complex topic that I cover in my book, but here I'll give you the basics of what you need to know.

First though, some theory. When I white balance a night sky shot, I always aim to get the sky color as neutral as possible. Even if I'm going to go for a warmer or cooler tone in the final product, I always aim to start with gray. The biggest reason for this is that by having a neutral white balance, I can bring the colors out more easily in Photoshop later.

I typically don't do too many adjustments in Lightroom for night sky shots, as I prefer to do most of the work in Photoshop since I have more control. For this image, I made the following adjustments:

And with that we're ready to bring the image into Photoshop. One trick once you've brought the image into Photoshop - be sure to unlock the background layer by clicking the little lock icon next to it.

Step 4 is probably the most important step in the entire process. We need to produce masks that allow us to modify individual areas of the photo separately. In this shot, the main thing I want is to be able to treat the foreground separately from the background. I also want to adjust bright and dark areas separately, so I will also use luminosity masks to achieve this.

Masks are a deep topic with a lot of nuances. In particular, this photo represents probably the simplest scenario you can have - a clean horizon line where you can just draw a mask in, which is exactly what we're going to do. It starts getting much more complex when you have trees, people, or other things in the shot.

If you haven't used this tool before, you just draw in the area you want to select, and Photoshop tries to be smart about finding edges. You can add and subtract from the selection using the toolbar buttons, or your option/control/command keys:

For night sky, I usually find it easiest to draw around the sky as opposed to the ground, since the sky is pretty uniform. Basically, just click somewhere in the sky near the ground (I started at lower left), and drag over to the lower right, then upper right, and finally upper left. You'll see the marching ants appear. You can refine the selection easily with the addition and subtraction tools. Here's what my selection looks like:

Now that you have your selection, we need to save it so we can use it later. Go to the Select menu and choose Save Selection. Give it a name like "Sky". If you go to the Channels palette, you'll see your selection there:

We're going to come back to the Channels palette a bunch during this tutorial, so get familiar with where it is. If you aren't familiar with it, all it does is displays masks from different sources. By default you get an RGB mask (e.g. select everything), and masks for red, green, and blue. As you save new masks, like your Sky mask, it will appear here.

Now that we have a sky mask, let's make a ground mask. Hold down Command (or the Control key on a PC) and click the Sky mask. You'll see the marching ants reappear. Now go to the Select menu and choose Inverse. Then, save this selection again, but call it "Ground".

The last thing we're going to do with masks for now is run our luminosity mask action. If you don't have an action to create luminosity masks, I've provided a link above where you can download an action for them. Run the action and you'll get a bunch of new channels on the channels palette, like "Brights 1", "Brights 2", "Darks 1", etc.

If you've been shooting night sky for any length of time, you've undoubtedly noticed noise (or grain) in your images. Depending on your camera, you might start seeing noise at ISOs as low as 800 or 1600. This image was taken with a Canon 6d, which is a reasonably good high ISO performer. I routinely shoot at ISO 6400 (as I did for this image), and sometimes higher.

The higher you shoot, the more noise is introduced into your image. Noise reduction software is useful for reducing noise, but at some of the higher ISOs other techniques are needed. For this image, we'll just be reducing noise with software.

Based on these two observations, we're going to reduce noise twice and combine the results. We'll apply a light noise reduction process to the sky, so as not to take away some of the fainter stars. For the ground, we'll apply a heavier noise reduction technique, but we'll recover some of the edge details later.

Fortunately this technique is easy, since we already made the masks we need! Let's start with the sky. I used Nik Dfine for this image. Dfine usually does a pretty good job picking out spots to measure, but it has trouble with the sky. So, I usually follow these steps:

Before we finish with Nik, flip over to the Reduce tab and reduce the contrast noise to around 30-50%. You can drag the red compare slider back and forth to see the effect, but generally I go for reducing only the very fine grain details in the sky.

If you don't like the results, you can go back and add more measure boxes (don't forget to click Measure Noise), or further reduce the contrast noise slider. I usually leave the color noise slider at 100% as I find that Nik does a good job overall with this type of noise.

The previous steps have all been about preparation - we haven't made that many interesting changes to our image. That's about to change! We'll start with the foreground, and in the next step take care of the sky.

Let's start by fixing the first two items. When I first worked on this image, I figured that the ground just needed an extra bit of sharpening. I found, however, that the sharpening by itself didn't really take care of restoring some of the detail in the ground. In particular, there are a lot of interesting edges and textures that I wanted to accentuate. To get the edges and textures where I wanted them required a lot of sharpening, which also introduced a lot of noise.

After some experimentation, I decided to use a detail extractor plugin. There are a bunch of different ones available, but I used the one in Nik Color Efex. This plugin has the effect of boosting local contrast a lot (kind of like clarity), and it's easy to overdo it. I wound up with these steps:

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