Peter! That was awesome, taught me more in 20min than the last 10+ vids I've seen. Not to say I won't have to watch this may more times, but thank you.
Awesome! Glad to hear it! As I mentioned in the video, Luminosity Masks have always been confusing to me. But, at least for our use at night, they are pretty straightforward! We need a nice clean white layer mask for the foreground, and black for the sky. Once we find a luminosity mask that gets us close, just adjust the levels to increase the black/white contrast, then paint in the foreground layer!
Excellent tutorial Peter! I purchased Raya Pro and Jimmy’s tutorials. I am fairly new to PS but have really enjoyed learning how to use Raya Pro. I have also really enjoyed your tutorials also. I have the same tracker that you use and really like it. Thanks again!
Thanks Terry! Glad to hear you're enjoying the tutorials! Yeah, Raya Pro is great to have for all kinds of photo editing, it's definitely made my life a lot easier. You should also check out the DXO Nik Collection (used to be Google Nik), it has a lot of great software that plugs into Photoshop.
If you have the Easy Panel 2.0, you can check out my new Easy Panel 2.0 video, along with over 7 hours of astrophotography post processing tutorials here: www.peterzelinka.com/astrophotography-post-processing 4:07 - Layer Mask Overview (for beginners) 5:49 - Instamask Tutorial 14:40 - Easy Panel Tutorial (Free way)
Hi brother, thank you so much for the video. I'm masking with the channels section. I have a problem, I do masking very well, but where there is masking, especially on the ends of trees and branches, I experience color deviations in yellow and red tones. How do I solve this problem?
Excellent. Two years after posting, I am doubting you will see my comment/question, but here goes. The step you noted would cause you more work, the changing of the angle of the camera for the two different shot, seems to me like a time saver. I say this because I have done this, using just luminosity masks. I even have a plugin for PS for this purpose. Anyway, with trees and so forth in the foreground I have had a lot of work cut out for myself: masking for the blurred out portions has required me to (just as you did with your shots) shift the sky laver to get rid of some of the blurry trees. With aligned shots, I lose more of the sky (the whole reason I was out there shooting!). Would you still give the same advice? I am thinking it is better to take the first shot at a higher angle, thus preserving more of it in post-processing. How about it?
My new technique is to take the foreground shot first, so I'm really happy with the composition. Then I find a nearby area that has a more wide open sky, with minimal foreground obstructions (easy to do out in the desert!). Then I setup the star tracker and mimic the milky way position as it was in the foreground shot. This makes blending much easier than taking both photos in the same spot
@@PeterZelinka Thanks. That's another option I've been considering after seeing some of the things AI sky replacement in action (something that Luminar seems to do better than Photoshop).
hi fantastic tutorial but what is control eich you mention on 12.37 i am dutch so i need to now what control eich is . is it a letter or just an e or t ? hope you repsond to my question . thank you
thx for the tutorial. What lens did you use for that shot? I am just wondering if such composition is best achieved with something really wide like 18mm or rather longer length
I'm having all sorts of issues trying to blend this image I shot a few weeks back. It's a astro landscape with a dead tree on the left of the image and the MW on the right. I tracked the sky exposure for 4 minutes and tracked the foreground lit by starlight for 4 minutes as well. My issue I run into is that the lone tree in the tracked image is blurry due to movement and when I blend, it is wider and larger than the foreground image tree due to the motion blur of the tracker. I think this may be an image that ends up sitting and not being edited as I don't see how it's possible to join the 2 exposures flawlessly.
Yeah, that's the #1 problem I see when people are trying to blend photos. The foreground elements blur out and create a major problem. I do cover how to fix this in my courses and over on my Patreon page if you want to learn more. Of course, the best thing to do is just not repeat the mistake next time. I always move things so that the star tracker photo doesn't have a large foreground object in it.
To work around this, I take an image of the same view of the night sky but with the camera placed ahead of the foreground image. It means taking two images from two positions. This may not work for all situations but for objects nearby which can be circumnavigated, it does the job. You still end up with a blurred horizon but this is usually manageable just like Peter has demonstrated by sliding the layers to hide the blurred edge.
Yeah that's the plan for next time now that I learned from this unintended learning situation due to my mistake. I love using the tracker and was happy that I was able to do a 4 minute exposure without any tracking. I can't wait to use it next MW season again but I'm just not a fan of the crazy hours you have to be up to capture the MW early in the season lol.
Great Video thanks Peter. I have just bought the Raya Pro package and in trying it on my images I've found that almost all of them have snow streaked mountains somewhere and because of the high contrast within just the foreground along the line between landscape and sky, it's really hard to create a mask that gets a clear distinction. Have you had this problem before? Thanks - Chris
Yeah, that would definitely make things more difficult! I've had a few images with some small patches of snow, and it was a pain to blend. If you had a whole mountain like that, I can see how difficult it would be. The quick selection tool might work, if you're lucky. If you wanted to send me a photo, I can try a few different techniques and see if I can come up with something.
Awesome tutorial. Learned a lot and got tons of inspiration to how I can take my skills to the next level. Thank you very much :) However. I would probably do a 3rd image to get stationary stars in the mirror reflection in the lake. What do you think?
Torbjørn Gustafson good idea! Frankly, I never have much success with star reflections. If they do show up, it's usually quite faint. Plus, if the water moves at all you'll have big streaks instead of pinpoints
Peter, in examples like this one with a lake in the foreground, do you encounter problems with the stars being sharper in the sky than in the reflection? That would seem to give an image a very unsatisfactory level of un-naturalness. Dealing with the sharpness of the reflection would only be another blending problem, right? I watched this video on my tablet, so I can’t tell with this image. Thanks!
Yeah, I never bothered to fix the star reflections in the lake. They show star trails. Really, all I should have to do is flip my sky layer vertically, and lightly blend in the stars into the lake. ...I think I'll give that a try and see how it goes!
Hi Peter. Thanks for the tutorial. I am wondering if I take several tracked exposures of the sky - including the background - to capture, for instance, a meteor shower, and then capture the background more than once with the tracker off, is worth or possible to use Sequator to stack them separately and after your technique?
Is there a particular reason you would take multiple images of the foreground? Personally, I would just take a single long exposure of the foreground (~4 minute shutter speed), which would capture plenty of light. Then, you could take all of your sky images and load them into Photoshop, in the same workspace as your foreground image. At that point I'd probably change the blending mode of the sky photos to lighten. If everything worked correctly, the stars should stay in the same place, since you were using a tracker, and any meteors now be visible. Lastly, you could do the blending technique to mask out the blurred foreground and finally have a complete image.
Thanks again. I got it. The reason why I mention multiple images of the foreground was to reduce the noise. But at a low ISO it is unnecessary, am I correct?
@@Light_hunter-gatherer The amount of noise in the photo is more closely tied to your shutter speed, rather than the ISO. If you take a short exposure, you don't capture much light. Therefore, you'll have a grainy photo regardless of your ISO. If you take a very long exposure, upwards of 4 minutes, you'll capture a ton of light and have a much cleaner image. To be honest, the ISO really doesn't matter as much when shooting at night. All ISO does is amplify whatever light was captured. You could do largely the same thing in post-processing by increasing the Exposure slider. However, you need an ISO Invariant Sensor for that to work properly. You can read more about all this on my website, if you're interested: www.peterzelinka.com/blog/2017/4/iso-invariance-with-a-nikon-d750
Startracker or image stacking on Photoshop for clean night sky photos. Why do I really need startracker? I can bring colors in postprocessing of the sky. Why do I really need this device? Great tutorial by the way :-)
Star tracker rotates the camera to counter the earth's rotational movement in reference to a polar star (most commonly the north star called Polaris, the tracker needs to be aligned to this star at first before tracking begins) so that you can take much sharper, cleaner and brighter image of the stars and galaxies by using long exposure and lower ISO. Otherwise you are limited to 10sec or less of exposure limit for a distortion free stars depending on which part of the world you are in. anything more than that, you will end up with star trails and washed out galaxies and colors. :)
Great tutorial! But how did you edit the MW and foreground before you blend it? When I'm done editing MW then I tried blending it with my foreground it looks unnatural.
I followed the link and instructions to get the Easy Panel extension. Scanned it, unzipped it, no instructions to install it in the pdf that came with it. It said to download *another* *installer* to install it. I called it quits. Too many hoops to jump through.
I have the same star tracker and recently purchased an Irix 15mm lens to replace my 14mm Rokinin (tho I'm not getting rid of it!). What are your settings for a 3-4 minute foreground exposure for a 14mm lens? And of course what exposure settings do you use for your MY image? Thanks for your vids and sharing your knowledge. I'm really interested in the Raya add-ons.
I normally use ISO 800 and f/2.8 for both the foreground and Milky Way (when using a star tracker). If for some reason I don't have my star tracker I'll normally use f/2.8, ISO 3200, and 15-20 second shutter speed
yeah, I ended up creating a new tutorial that goes through the process for the Easy Panel 2.0 in my Astrophotography Post-Processing Course: www.peterzelinka.com/astrophotography-post-processing
Wait a minute! What about the water? You failed to blend in tracked images of the reflected stars. You neglected to even take those images. The reflections don’t match the sky, a sure sign of fabrication and amateur Photoshop techniques that make the manipulation obvious and the image dismissible as a fake. Try again with better shooting and masking methods. Next time don’t move the camera! Just turn the tracker motor off. Whether you shoot the untracked images first or at the end depends on where in the sky you are aimed. Shoot untracked shots first if you are facing east; last if you are facing west as you were here. But in this case you might need to shoot an untracked shot first as well as after the tracked shots, with the first shot supplying the static reflected foreground.
Lake reflections very often don't match the night sky above, even in a single 30 second exposure. When there's a slight breeze, the stars tend to blur out. I've also shot lakes at night and the water was completely opaque. A "realistic reflection", where the night sky is perfectly reflected in a lake, is very often fake. Plus, the whole point of this tutorial was to show how to blend a sky with a complicated foreground. This image had a very complicated horizon with all the tree branches, making it the perfect example. As for using the tracker effectively, I would argue that's not the best idea. I can't remember if I mention it in the video or not, but all those blurred trees make the blending process a nightmare. It's much better to find a different spot, with a more open sky. From there, you can take your tracked exposure for the sky, without all the trees in the way. Ideally you can do this before the stars move too much, and keep the same position of the stars for your blending. Of course, this isn't always possible. And I was facing north east in this image, not west. That further complicated things, since the large trees on the right blurred upwards, making them even more of a pain to blend. If I would have moved to a different location, after capturing my foreground, I may have been able to find a less obstructed view of the northern sky. From there, I could've taken a tracked exposure, without trees, and had a much easier time in Photoshop. Lastly, if I were to take a single, ~20 second image for the lake reflection, it would appear much more grainy than the rest of the photo. Since it's a lake though, I could perform heavy noise reduction without too much apparent quality loss. However, most lakes don't reflect much light, meaning a much longer exposure is needed to even show the Milky Way. For example, the foreground exposure in this video was 4 minutes long. Even after 4 minutes, the lake is still very dark and the Milky Way is not visible. Point being, the reflections will not always match the sky. This does not indicate " a sure sign of fabrication and amateur Photoshop techniques". I would argue most of the photos you see with a pristine lake reflection, especially on large lakes, are fake to some extent. Of course, it's possible to get images like that, but it's quite rare to get those perfect conditions.
@@PeterZelinka Thanks and I would agree that images with lots of pinpoint stars in the water are often fake, where someone has simply flipped the sky into the water. But in your case it looked like you had a chance of decent star images in the calm water even in the long tracked image(s). I'm from the purist school on TWAN nightscape photography that says you don't move the camera, otherwise that isn't the Milky Way present at that site at that time and in the correct placement relative to the horizon. After all, why not just cut and paste in a MW shot at some other time and place altogether? If you take the images quickly enough the mismatch between the tracked and untracked horizons, even with complex trees, isn't too great though still requires shifting the sky or ground a little, but not nearly so much as you did. Still, a nice tutorial and great to see Jimmy McIntyre's extension panels get some PR -- they are excellent and very useful. I think Greg Benz has a tutorial on his Lumenzia channel about stacking and merging sky, ground and reflected water elements using his Luminosity masks extensions. Though he was not using a tracker as I recall. Cheers!
@@Amazingsky My problem with the purist mindset is that it severely limits the possibilities of astrophotography. A star tracker is required to capture more details and color, and to reduce noise. For example, if I photograph a mountain at 200mm, I can only shoot for maybe 2 or 3 seconds before the stars blur. That will never create a great photo, due to the severe lack of light. I'd much rather take a very long exposure, to get enough light in the foreground. Then, take multiple tracked exposures for the sky. Once I've gotten a few minutes of exposure time for the sky, I can stack them and reduce the grain. Finally, I can blend that final image with the foreground. This would create a beautiful, detailed, and noise-free photo. With all that said, I still advocate for keeping an image as realistic as possible. I wouldn't want to paste the southern night sky over a north-facing foreground. I'll have to check out Greg's video, sounds interesting! Thanks for the suggestion!
@@PeterZelinka Absolutely agree. I'm not so purist that images have to be single exposures. That would be an impossible standard to maintain. We're always battling the limitations of the subject -- low light, camera noise, and a moving sky -- and overcoming those limits usually requires more than one exposure, camera setting, or technique. The distinction is between what we in the TWAN World at Night group call "soft composites," or now sometimes referred to as blends, which are "acceptable," and "hard composites" which are not, at least not for the purposes of publication or contest entries at TWANight.org. For the latter hard composites the photographer inevitably moved the camera a lot in space or time, so the sky doesn't belong to the ground. The former soft composites, for example, are star trails, depth of field focus blends, exposure blends, and tracked/untracked blends. But the common factor is that the camera doesn't move. Clear skies!
That's the video I was looking for ages. Thanks 👍 you do an awesome job!
Peter! That was awesome, taught me more in 20min than the last 10+ vids I've seen. Not to say I won't have to watch this may more times, but thank you.
Awesome! Glad to hear it!
As I mentioned in the video, Luminosity Masks have always been confusing to me. But, at least for our use at night, they are pretty straightforward!
We need a nice clean white layer mask for the foreground, and black for the sky. Once we find a luminosity mask that gets us close, just adjust the levels to increase the black/white contrast, then paint in the foreground layer!
Excellent tutorial Peter! I purchased Raya Pro and Jimmy’s tutorials. I am fairly new to PS but have really enjoyed learning how to use Raya Pro. I have also really enjoyed your tutorials also. I have the same tracker that you use and really like it. Thanks again!
Thanks Terry! Glad to hear you're enjoying the tutorials! Yeah, Raya Pro is great to have for all kinds of photo editing, it's definitely made my life a lot easier. You should also check out the DXO Nik Collection (used to be Google Nik), it has a lot of great software that plugs into Photoshop.
I've been fighting with this for a year. If you were here in Calgary I would kiss you on the cheek!!!!! Finally a clean blend.
Extremely useful. I've had issues trying to blend in foregrounds with trees and this makes it a breeze.
Gorgeous..I want to paint it..stunning…
Good stuff. My biggest problem has always been the blending. I just got the iOptron tracker tho so I need to learn. This vid was helpful!
Thank you. This was so helpful, I wish I knew this last year!! Well, never too late!
Wow so awesome! I think I will get it by watching a couple more times
this is verry difficult . but this is the way i should go . thank you sir.
If you have the Easy Panel 2.0, you can check out my new Easy Panel 2.0 video, along with over 7 hours of astrophotography post processing tutorials here:
www.peterzelinka.com/astrophotography-post-processing
4:07 - Layer Mask Overview (for beginners)
5:49 - Instamask Tutorial
14:40 - Easy Panel Tutorial (Free way)
Hi brother, thank you so much for the video. I'm masking with the channels section. I have a problem, I do masking very well, but where there is masking, especially on the ends of trees and branches, I experience color deviations in yellow and red tones. How do I solve this problem?
Excellent. Two years after posting, I am doubting you will see my comment/question, but here goes. The step you noted would cause you more work, the changing of the angle of the camera for the two different shot, seems to me like a time saver. I say this because I have done this, using just luminosity masks. I even have a plugin for PS for this purpose. Anyway, with trees and so forth in the foreground I have had a lot of work cut out for myself: masking for the blurred out portions has required me to (just as you did with your shots) shift the sky laver to get rid of some of the blurry trees. With aligned shots, I lose more of the sky (the whole reason I was out there shooting!). Would you still give the same advice?
I am thinking it is better to take the first shot at a higher angle, thus preserving more of it in post-processing. How about it?
My new technique is to take the foreground shot first, so I'm really happy with the composition. Then I find a nearby area that has a more wide open sky, with minimal foreground obstructions (easy to do out in the desert!). Then I setup the star tracker and mimic the milky way position as it was in the foreground shot. This makes blending much easier than taking both photos in the same spot
Peter Zelinka you just clarified one of my most nagging questions. Thanks.
@@PeterZelinka Thanks. That's another option I've been considering after seeing some of the things AI sky replacement in action (something that Luminar seems to do better than Photoshop).
hi fantastic tutorial but what is control eich you mention on 12.37 i am dutch so i need to now what control eich is . is it a letter or just an e or t ? hope you repsond to my question . thank you
Hey Peter can you do a follow up tutorial for Easy Panel 2.0?
Great video! Very well done
how would you process a lighthouse with multiple images of milkyway for stacking? Trying to keep the lighthouse from over expouse.
thx for the tutorial. What lens did you use for that shot?
I am just wondering if such composition is best achieved with something really wide like 18mm or rather longer length
I'm having all sorts of issues trying to blend this image I shot a few weeks back. It's a astro landscape with a dead tree on the left of the image and the MW on the right. I tracked the sky exposure for 4 minutes and tracked the foreground lit by starlight for 4 minutes as well. My issue I run into is that the lone tree in the tracked image is blurry due to movement and when I blend, it is wider and larger than the foreground image tree due to the motion blur of the tracker. I think this may be an image that ends up sitting and not being edited as I don't see how it's possible to join the 2 exposures flawlessly.
Yeah, that's the #1 problem I see when people are trying to blend photos. The foreground elements blur out and create a major problem. I do cover how to fix this in my courses and over on my Patreon page if you want to learn more.
Of course, the best thing to do is just not repeat the mistake next time. I always move things so that the star tracker photo doesn't have a large foreground object in it.
To work around this, I take an image of the same view of the night sky but with the camera placed ahead of the foreground image. It means taking two images from two positions. This may not work for all situations but for objects nearby which can be circumnavigated, it does the job. You still end up with a blurred horizon but this is usually manageable just like Peter has demonstrated by sliding the layers to hide the blurred edge.
Yeah that's the plan for next time now that I learned from this unintended learning situation due to my mistake. I love using the tracker and was happy that I was able to do a 4 minute exposure without any tracking. I can't wait to use it next MW season again but I'm just not a fan of the crazy hours you have to be up to capture the MW early in the season lol.
Great video buddy
Great Video thanks Peter. I have just bought the Raya Pro package and in trying it on my images I've found that almost all of them have snow streaked mountains somewhere and because of the high contrast within just the foreground along the line between landscape and sky, it's really hard to create a mask that gets a clear distinction. Have you had this problem before? Thanks - Chris
Yeah, that would definitely make things more difficult! I've had a few images with some small patches of snow, and it was a pain to blend. If you had a whole mountain like that, I can see how difficult it would be.
The quick selection tool might work, if you're lucky.
If you wanted to send me a photo, I can try a few different techniques and see if I can come up with something.
@@PeterZelinka Thanks very much I might do that at some point. Or I might try the 'Challenge Jimmy' thing. Thanks for your help.
Great tutorial.
Awesome tutorial. Learned a lot and got tons of inspiration to how I can take my skills to the next level. Thank you very much :)
However. I would probably do a 3rd image to get stationary stars in the mirror reflection in the lake. What do you think?
Torbjørn Gustafson good idea!
Frankly, I never have much success with star reflections. If they do show up, it's usually quite faint. Plus, if the water moves at all you'll have big streaks instead of pinpoints
Peter, in examples like this one with a lake in the foreground, do you encounter problems with the stars being sharper in the sky than in the reflection? That would seem to give an image a very unsatisfactory level of un-naturalness. Dealing with the sharpness of the reflection would only be another blending problem, right? I watched this video on my tablet, so I can’t tell with this image. Thanks!
Yeah, I never bothered to fix the star reflections in the lake. They show star trails. Really, all I should have to do is flip my sky layer vertically, and lightly blend in the stars into the lake.
...I think I'll give that a try and see how it goes!
Hi Peter. Thanks for the tutorial. I am wondering if I take several tracked exposures of the sky - including the background - to capture, for instance, a meteor shower, and then capture the background more than once with the tracker off, is worth or possible to use Sequator to stack them separately and after your technique?
Is there a particular reason you would take multiple images of the foreground? Personally, I would just take a single long exposure of the foreground (~4 minute shutter speed), which would capture plenty of light. Then, you could take all of your sky images and load them into Photoshop, in the same workspace as your foreground image.
At that point I'd probably change the blending mode of the sky photos to lighten. If everything worked correctly, the stars should stay in the same place, since you were using a tracker, and any meteors now be visible. Lastly, you could do the blending technique to mask out the blurred foreground and finally have a complete image.
Thanks again. I got it. The reason why I mention multiple images of the foreground was to reduce the noise. But at a low ISO it is unnecessary, am I correct?
@@Light_hunter-gatherer The amount of noise in the photo is more closely tied to your shutter speed, rather than the ISO. If you take a short exposure, you don't capture much light. Therefore, you'll have a grainy photo regardless of your ISO. If you take a very long exposure, upwards of 4 minutes, you'll capture a ton of light and have a much cleaner image.
To be honest, the ISO really doesn't matter as much when shooting at night. All ISO does is amplify whatever light was captured. You could do largely the same thing in post-processing by increasing the Exposure slider. However, you need an ISO Invariant Sensor for that to work properly. You can read more about all this on my website, if you're interested:
www.peterzelinka.com/blog/2017/4/iso-invariance-with-a-nikon-d750
Startracker or image stacking on Photoshop for clean night sky photos. Why do I really need startracker? I can bring colors in postprocessing of the sky. Why do I really need this device? Great tutorial by the way :-)
Star tracker rotates the camera to counter the earth's rotational movement in reference to a polar star (most commonly the north star called Polaris, the tracker needs to be aligned to this star at first before tracking begins) so that you can take much sharper, cleaner and brighter image of the stars and galaxies by using long exposure and lower ISO. Otherwise you are limited to 10sec or less of exposure limit for a distortion free stars depending on which part of the world you are in. anything more than that, you will end up with star trails and washed out galaxies and colors. :)
Am I right in thinking that you can't use Sequator to stack a tracked sky and a static foreground? I tried and failed so reverted to Photoshop
P.S I got some noticeable colour noise on my D750 after 3 min exposure with the MSM is that normal?
Great tutorial! But how did you edit the MW and foreground before you blend it? When I'm done editing MW then I tried blending it with my foreground it looks unnatural.
I followed the link and instructions to get the Easy Panel extension. Scanned it, unzipped it, no instructions to install it in the pdf that came with it. It said to download *another* *installer* to install it. I called it quits. Too many hoops to jump through.
I finally got it sorted. Now time to play with it a while to learn how to use it. :)
THANKYOU...
When you click on your second image at the top it then appears in layers Mine does not do that, why?
hi, so instamask is a feature of raya pro right?
Yep!
I have the same star tracker and recently purchased an Irix 15mm lens to replace my 14mm Rokinin (tho I'm not getting rid of it!). What are your settings for a 3-4 minute foreground exposure for a 14mm lens? And of course what exposure settings do you use for your MY image? Thanks for your vids and sharing your knowledge. I'm really interested in the Raya add-ons.
I normally use ISO 800 and f/2.8 for both the foreground and Milky Way (when using a star tracker).
If for some reason I don't have my star tracker I'll normally use f/2.8, ISO 3200, and 15-20 second shutter speed
New Easy Panel is extremely different from this tutorial
yeah, I ended up creating a new tutorial that goes through the process for the Easy Panel 2.0 in my Astrophotography Post-Processing Course:
www.peterzelinka.com/astrophotography-post-processing
Wait a minute! What about the water? You failed to blend in tracked images of the reflected stars. You neglected to even take those images. The reflections don’t match the sky, a sure sign of fabrication and amateur Photoshop techniques that make the manipulation obvious and the image dismissible as a fake. Try again with better shooting and masking methods. Next time don’t move the camera! Just turn the tracker motor off. Whether you shoot the untracked images first or at the end depends on where in the sky you are aimed. Shoot untracked shots first if you are facing east; last if you are facing west as you were here. But in this case you might need to shoot an untracked shot first as well as after the tracked shots, with the first shot supplying the static reflected foreground.
Lake reflections very often don't match the night sky above, even in a single 30 second exposure. When there's a slight breeze, the stars tend to blur out. I've also shot lakes at night and the water was completely opaque. A "realistic reflection", where the night sky is perfectly reflected in a lake, is very often fake. Plus, the whole point of this tutorial was to show how to blend a sky with a complicated foreground. This image had a very complicated horizon with all the tree branches, making it the perfect example.
As for using the tracker effectively, I would argue that's not the best idea. I can't remember if I mention it in the video or not, but all those blurred trees make the blending process a nightmare. It's much better to find a different spot, with a more open sky. From there, you can take your tracked exposure for the sky, without all the trees in the way. Ideally you can do this before the stars move too much, and keep the same position of the stars for your blending. Of course, this isn't always possible.
And I was facing north east in this image, not west. That further complicated things, since the large trees on the right blurred upwards, making them even more of a pain to blend. If I would have moved to a different location, after capturing my foreground, I may have been able to find a less obstructed view of the northern sky. From there, I could've taken a tracked exposure, without trees, and had a much easier time in Photoshop.
Lastly, if I were to take a single, ~20 second image for the lake reflection, it would appear much more grainy than the rest of the photo. Since it's a lake though, I could perform heavy noise reduction without too much apparent quality loss. However, most lakes don't reflect much light, meaning a much longer exposure is needed to even show the Milky Way. For example, the foreground exposure in this video was 4 minutes long. Even after 4 minutes, the lake is still very dark and the Milky Way is not visible.
Point being, the reflections will not always match the sky. This does not indicate " a sure sign of fabrication and amateur Photoshop techniques". I would argue most of the photos you see with a pristine lake reflection, especially on large lakes, are fake to some extent. Of course, it's possible to get images like that, but it's quite rare to get those perfect conditions.
@@PeterZelinka Thanks and I would agree that images with lots of pinpoint stars in the water are often fake, where someone has simply flipped the sky into the water. But in your case it looked like you had a chance of decent star images in the calm water even in the long tracked image(s). I'm from the purist school on TWAN nightscape photography that says you don't move the camera, otherwise that isn't the Milky Way present at that site at that time and in the correct placement relative to the horizon. After all, why not just cut and paste in a MW shot at some other time and place altogether? If you take the images quickly enough the mismatch between the tracked and untracked horizons, even with complex trees, isn't too great though still requires shifting the sky or ground a little, but not nearly so much as you did. Still, a nice tutorial and great to see Jimmy McIntyre's extension panels get some PR -- they are excellent and very useful. I think Greg Benz has a tutorial on his Lumenzia channel about stacking and merging sky, ground and reflected water elements using his Luminosity masks extensions. Though he was not using a tracker as I recall. Cheers!
@@Amazingsky My problem with the purist mindset is that it severely limits the possibilities of astrophotography. A star tracker is required to capture more details and color, and to reduce noise. For example, if I photograph a mountain at 200mm, I can only shoot for maybe 2 or 3 seconds before the stars blur. That will never create a great photo, due to the severe lack of light. I'd much rather take a very long exposure, to get enough light in the foreground. Then, take multiple tracked exposures for the sky. Once I've gotten a few minutes of exposure time for the sky, I can stack them and reduce the grain. Finally, I can blend that final image with the foreground. This would create a beautiful, detailed, and noise-free photo.
With all that said, I still advocate for keeping an image as realistic as possible. I wouldn't want to paste the southern night sky over a north-facing foreground.
I'll have to check out Greg's video, sounds interesting! Thanks for the suggestion!
@@PeterZelinka Absolutely agree. I'm not so purist that images have to be single exposures. That would be an impossible standard to maintain. We're always battling the limitations of the subject -- low light, camera noise, and a moving sky -- and overcoming those limits usually requires more than one exposure, camera setting, or technique. The distinction is between what we in the TWAN World at Night group call "soft composites," or now sometimes referred to as blends, which are "acceptable," and "hard composites" which are not, at least not for the purposes of publication or contest entries at TWANight.org. For the latter hard composites the photographer inevitably moved the camera a lot in space or time, so the sky doesn't belong to the ground. The former soft composites, for example, are star trails, depth of field focus blends, exposure blends, and tracked/untracked blends. But the common factor is that the camera doesn't move. Clear skies!