If you are interested in learning how to take a milky way photograph then just use the search box on this blog - type in 'milky way' and all the posts should materialise.
In this blog post I am going to share how I post edit my milky way photographs after stacking them. I tend to take multiple shots and then stack them. I do foreground shots separately, process them and then blend the two together. It is a dark art and I rarely get it right but slowly I am making progress. Some days!
So, after stacking my milky way lights in either SIRIL, Affinity Photo or Sequator, what do I then do to them? Well, this post is all about the sky/milky way bit only. I am aiming to get detail in the stars; detail in the milky way; a natural look to the sky with minimal noise and artifacting.
Here are my steps to post editing the sky/milky way element:
- a 'global' edit in 'Develop' persona in Affinity photo - what other programs may call camera RAW
- White balance - cool look between 3500K and 4500K
- slight increase to exposure if the sky/milky way look underexposed - but I try to avoid blowing out the stars
- adding some contrast to separate out the milky way (MW) from the background sky
- raising the shadows slightly to reveal the MW details
- lower the highlights slider a little to recover bright stars
- add a moderate amount of clarity and/or texture to enhance details and recover detail in the dust lanes
- some initial noise reduction - some modest luminance early on.
- firstly, pulling up the mid tones
- adding a little more contrast by adjusting dark and light ends of the histogram curve - applying a series of very small shallow S curve adjustments
- some level adjustments to clip unwanted black levels and to brighten image overall
- playing about with midtones and shadows to darken the background sky without affecting the MW - using selections and masks
- applying some local contrast adjustments on the duplicate layer - using high pass or unsharp filters
- applying some dehazing and clarity to selected areas to enhance detail
- some selective masking to enhance particular adjustments such as boosting contrast further
- colour balance and hue work - to make the core pop
- saturation masks to control colour boosting in selected areas of the MW
- I may save the image as a Tiff at this point an put it into GraXpert for background work and denoising before bringing it back into affinity photo for further work
- I may well also put it into SIRIL and do starnet separation work to get a starless image and a starmask image. I will work on this latter image to reduce star size, intensity and frequency before doing a star recomposition. This then gives me an image where the milky way isn't overpowered by surrounding stars
- using gradient maps or selective colour to add subtle purple, blue and magenta hues to the milky way area (this is one area I just don't understand and haven't yet got right)
- cropping
- removing any distractions e.g. trails
- sharpening the MW core a little more using masks
