Hopefully they’re looking awesome by now. Up to now we’ve been concentrating on the sky. (again, I go through all this step by step in the video if you want a more visual representation).Īstrophotography Editing - the foreground If you do both of these subtly enough you can really make your Milky Way pop without the image looking too over-processed. You can’t go too wild with this because it’ll stick out a mile and be really obvious, but a subtle boost can do wonders.Ĭonversely, make a new Adjustment Brush, turn DOWN the clarity, and add in some further noise reduction, and paint the rest of the sky that you don’t want to emphasise as much. Make a brush with a slight clarity and exposure boost - maybe a bit of saturation if you’ve got some Milky Way nebula in your image - and brush over the Milky Way to give it a beautiful, yet hopefully subtle boost. The magic happens with the Adjustment Brushes. Go wild!Īstrophotography Editing - The secret sauce! This can help emphasise the stars without it becoming too harsh.Īdd some noise reduction and sharpening back in. Some more global edits you can add if your image isn’t quite popping yet:īoost the whites and pull down the blacks slidersĪdd a bit more clarity if you’re feeling cheeky This won’t be a perfect fit for every single photo but it should get you in the ballpark. Tweak that tone curve to taste, of course. The main boosting comes from the tone curve Get your white balance correct before continuingīring the highlights down about half way, and the shadows up about a quarter The best approach I’ve found is to approach your image as two images: the stars, and the land. You can put your lovely clean base image into Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, or Luminar etc. BOOM! Photo Stacking Step 3 - The Final Edit
Astro photo stacking software software#
If you want to see how the software works in the flesh so to speak, check out the video walk through at the top of this article.Įxport as a TIFF. You should be left with a clean and wonderful image. See! Stacking doesn’t take too long at all does it?! Then once you’ve done the dot business, you can tell the software to stack. If you have trees or branches etc, you can take your time to get this part perfectly right, or just leave your fiddly parts as part of the land. Using the ADD DOTS and ERASE DOTS tool, put loads of dots in the sky area and make sure there are no dots on the land.
Astro photo stacking software manual#
Input the focal length (if you used a manual focus lens) Import the images into Starry Landscape Stacker
If you’ve ever shot some astrophotography time-lapses you can grab 10-50 of those frames and stack them into one super clean image too. So keep that in mind when you’re out shooting. All the settings need to be identical, including the ISO, and even on the blank frames for this to work. Import the photos into Starry Landscape Stacker.