How To Enhance Night Photography Using Photoshop Editing Techniques – In this article, I share five photo editing techniques in Photoshop that you can use to create beautiful night photos.
I have covered the field process for taking night photos in another post. There, I explain how to use blending time to achieve high quality results. But I didn’t share how to edit those photos. This requires combining images taken in very different lighting conditions. When photographing the night sky during celestial twilight or at night, I photograph in the foreground during the blue hour.
How To Enhance Night Photography Using Photoshop Editing Techniques
The first step to successfully blending this type of image is to get the color temperature right during the raw processing phase of editing. It also helps to darken the blue hour photo and make it look like a night photo. But make sure that at least some details are visible in the foreground. You can use the “Temperature,” “Exposure” and “Shadow” sliders in Lightroom. Use the latter to preserve details in dark tones while using the “Exposure” slider to darken the entire image. Lowering the saturation momentarily can also help, as the colors are less bright at night.
Night Photography Settings
The star photo was taken at ISO 6400 using F/2.8 and an 8 second exposure. This way, I made sure to shoot the pointing star. After 20 minutes I took a photo that was used for most of the sky. A close-up photo was taken after another 20 minutes.
However, the main work should be done in Photoshop. In the main video, I go through a few steps and share the best way for me to edit night photos.
During the mix I show in the video, I took most of the sky from photos taken during the afternoon. At that time, the exposure time was usually between 30 and 60 seconds if you were shooting at a low ISO. This is enough to make faint star trails among the few stars still visible in the sky. An airplane passing by also left a visible trail.
A quick way to remove those traces is the “Dust and Scratches” filter in the “Noise” filter. First, zoom in 100% on the most prominent trace that you want to remove. Then set the “threshold” to zero and slowly increase the radius. A value between 10 and 20 is usually sufficient.
Introducing My Lightroom Preset Pack For Night Photography
Next, use the “Threshold” slider to bring back some detail. I usually keep the value below ten and use masking to select the filter. This way, you can remove small stains and marks faster than cloning.
With Lightroom’s AI noise reduction, you can get fairly clean images even when shooting at high ISO. In the main video, I show how good a photo at ISO 6400 looks after some adjustments in Lightroom. But usually there is still some noise.
With this trick you can remove the stars in the photo while giving it a nice light. This is great for photos of the setting stars. On the other hand, for real night photos with lots of stars, this technique is not very suitable. But you can always try it and see how it turns out:
If this still seems strange to you, follow my video tutorial. Now it makes more sense.
My First Stars/milky Way Shot,but I Don’t Like The Result,any Tips For A Better Editing?(capture One Sony Or Lightroom)
I have a separate article on how to make the perfect sky selection using a combination of AI, Mask Repair and Dodge and burn. The techniques I will share in this article are very useful for putting together night photos.
This is necessary to make an accurate choice of the sky. You use it to blend the night sky with the blue hour photo foreground. At first it seems scary and you have a harsh contrast on the horizon. But there is a cure for this.
I took 40 photos of the night sky and averaged them using the sequartor. After about 90 minutes I took a close-up photo.
The only good option is preparation. The most important part of editing a photo like the one above is making a convincing combination. Working with “curves” in Photoshop and darkening the foreground layer until it is almost completely black creates the most convincing result: seeing nothing in the foreground is realistic for night scenes.
Take The Best Night Photos With Iphone!
But it’s boring. After all, why do you take photos at blue hour? You have done this by painting the “Curves” adjustment layer mask with a black brush at low opacity to reveal the currently selected area. Go slow and give details slowly. Try not to go too far to achieve the most reliable results.
In this case, it is useful to work in a slightly dark environment. Then, you can keep the dark look more suitable for night photos.
The two photo examples in this article show natural corals. It is also very dark and the tonal range of shadow areas is reduced. That’s why it’s more important to clean the foreground and create a smooth transition in the shadows. You can use the advanced cloning technique that I share in this article. A combination of cloning, frequency separation and selective blurring of low frequency layers can be used for this type of desert photography.
Be careful in mixing and do not apply to the edges. It creates amazing works of art. It works best for flat, structured areas.
How To Turn Day Into Night In Lightroom
Using the techniques I have shown above you can achieve high quality results by creating night or sunset photos. The image is still detailed enough for large prints and low noise. For maximum quality, use focus stacking for blue hour photos and image averaging for night photos. Free tools like Sequator can do the average in seconds. This can significantly reduce noise in the sky and make photos taken at ISO 6400 look like images taken at ISO 100.
Michael Breitung is a freelance landscape and travel photographer from Germany. During the past 10 years he has visited almost 30 countries to build a high quality portfolio and hone his skills as a photographer. He also has a growing YouTube channel where he shares behind the scenes of his travels, as well as his knowledge of photo editing. So after a successful photography trip (5 Top Tips for Photographing the Stars and the Night Sky), take pictures of the stars. Here is a simple process I use to edit RAW files. This works in Lightroom 4, 5 and Camera Raw. I edited my images in 16-bit mode with Pro Photo color profile and tiff file format. You can set this in Lightroom 5 from Edit → Preferences → External Edit. If you want to know all my tips and tricks, check out my Star Photography Masterclass eBook.
The first thing is to decide how you want to see the picture. By doing the main settings, you can change the exposure contrast etc. Most of the time I find myself adding a bit of exposure and contrast. This is where I also adjust the color balance using the white balance slider. In this example, I increased the contrast to +45 and lowered the highlights to -36. I added saturation at +7.
A graduated filter is a great tool to use for this type of image. I used my “Night Sky Clarity” preset which added a lot of contrast and clarity. (Settings: Exposure 0, 29, Contrast 81, Clarity 76) Drag the slider to where you want the star to appear. In this particular image I also added another slider to darken the top of the frame and balance the sky and ground. I also darkened the sky to the right where the moon is. A radial filter works basically like a pass filter, but adds a circular adjustment. This is a great tool to use if you need to edit part of the sky. For example, you can use it to improve the details of the Milky Way by precisely adding contrast and exposure to the Milky Way part of the image.
Tips For Astrophotography
I used the Nikon 16 – 35mm f/4.0 VR lens in this photo. It has relatively low distortion at 35mm focal length. Click Enable Lens Correction. I lowered the vignetting setting to 55. After this, I went to the manual setting to fix the perspective distortion. In this particular case I set the vertical slider to -35 which seemed to work well.
For the Samyang 14mm f/2.8 lens, the same dialog works if you have installed presets for the lens. Use Adobe Lens Profile Download http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=5492 to download the profile. On this particular lens, it does a great job with distortion and vignetting. I use the Nikon D700 correction version because it works fine on the D800.
I use this dialog to adjust the noise reduction. This is great for images captured at high ISO. this picture
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