Help with blending nightscape

[Iem1]

Hey guys, hope you are well!

I had a second outing with my new Samyang lens last night to try some nightscapes, I am quite happy with how it went overall.

I got what I think is a nice image, 90 second tracked milkyway shot and a few 90 second foreground shots that I have stacked in PS. I am struggling to blend the images unfortunately. Compared to my first attempt, the foreground has moved between foreground/star shots and so it is not as simple as cutting out the 'bad sky' as was the case with my first.

Is it still possible to blend these? I think if I can blend them I will need to use the healing brush to clean up the overlap between leftover bad sky etc But I cant really get that far yet.

Sorry if none of that makes sense, I am new to nightscapes and this method of processing  

Here is a tif of the sky and the stacked foreground if anyone wants a closer look to see if it salvageable. 

Sky(tif).tif

Stacked land (tif).tif

 

And here is png for initial idea of what I am working with.

And the land;

 

Any advice is appreciated  

[ollypenrice]

Hmmm, you've made life hard for yourself by choosing a foreground which has sky both above it and below it! 😜 (Those branches sticking out into the sky on the right hand side.) Without that, you could just paste the foreground image on top of the sky image, and move the foreground up a bit to cover the blur. However, I do have an idea... I'll try it and get back if it works!

🤣lly

Edited October 11, 2021 by ollypenrice

[Alien 13]

I think what I would do is slightly enlarge the foreground layer so that it overlaps any motion blur from the image of the sky then blend the two layers together. Then paint out the fiddly bits using a layer mask.

Alan  

Edited October 11, 2021 by Alien 13

[Iem1]

29 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

Hmmm, you've made life hard for yourself by choosing a foreground which has sky both above it and below it! 😜 (Those branches sticking out into the sky on the right hand side.) Without that, you could just paste the foreground image on top of the sky image, and move the foreground up a bit to cover the blur. However, I do have an idea... I'll try it and get back if it works!

🤣lly

Story of my life!  

hmmm, Il have a play with that idea too. Haven't yet tried necessarily moving either of the images, just cutting and dropping and trying to fix...Which I haven't had much success with  

lesson learnt though, nice flat uniform foregrounds that fall within the capabilities of my basic PS abilities lol

Thank you Olly!

17 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

I think what I would do is slightly enlarge the foreground layer so that it overlaps any motion blur from the image of the sky then blend the two layers together. Then paint out the fiddly bits using a layer mask.

Alan  

Thank you Alan! Im going to give this a shot shortly!

...If all else fails, I did have another plan. I did take a full FOV image of the milkyway near the zenith...that would drop in nice and easily behind he foreground I think...But I would feel like I am cheating doing that..and I do not think it would look very natural  

[ollypenrice]

34 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

I think what I would do is slightly enlarge the foreground layer so that it overlaps any motion blur from the image of the sky then blend the two layers together. Then paint out the fiddly bits using a layer mask.

Alan  

That was my idea was well, Alan, but it increases the distances between foreground objects so the foreground image still fails to cover the sky! I'm now playing with another idea...

Olly

[ollypenrice]

In the end the best I could do, which isn't very good,  was to paste  one onto the other (foreground on top), align them and use the colour select tool to pick the bright sky, after which I erased it.

You have the Coathanger Cluster showing particularly sweetly. One of my favourites!

Nest time, pick a simple foreground!!!

Another thought: take a single, long sub for the foreground then, as quickly as possible, start the astro subs. Align the stacks onto the first sub when stacking the astros.

Olly

Edited October 11, 2021 by ollypenrice
Forgot the picture.

[Iem1]

9 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

In the end the best I could do, which isn't very good,  was to paste  one onto the other (foreground on top), align them and use the colour select tool to pick the bright sky, after which I erased it.

You have the Coathanger Cluster showing particularly sweetly. One of my favourites!

Nest time, pick a simple foreground!!!

Olly

That is a great effort! Thank you for taking the time to help me out, I do appreciate it  

Il have a few more attempts and see if I can find some guides online, but the movement between the foregrounds is huge for some reason. maybe I nudged the mount or something.

That or I will just cut my losses and take the original sky image as the completed image and just have a slightly blurred silhouette of the church/trees  

[Mike73]

The best way by far for blending tricky foreground and sky together is by using Luminosity masks.

I'II come back to this later as I'm just heading off to work now but in the meantime take a look at this video it should help.

 

[Alien 13]

6 minutes ago, Iem1 said:

That is a great effort! Thank you for taking the time to help me out, I do appreciate it  

Il have a few more attempts and see if I can find some guides online, but the movement between the foregrounds is huge for some reason. maybe I nudged the mount or something.

That or I will just cut my losses and take the original sky image as the completed image and just have a slightly blurred silhouette of the church/trees  

Its always difficult when there is foliage in the foreground, another idea based on your last sentence would be to use the original blurred church but blend in some highlights from the windows etc and do the same with some of the lower foreground too.

Alan

[fwm891]

I've used the two images in PS and treated them with layer masks after selecting, then cutting out the sky in one. Reversing the selection expanding the selction by 1 pixel and deleting the forground. Then getting as much as possible from each before flattening and rescling.

Hope you like

[Iem1]

I was about to post 'Where I had got to' in my progress before fwm posted that amazing effort!

..Think Il keep the monstrosity I had created to myself now  

Thank you guys, il be tinkering with it for most of the day and trying out the suggestions.

Very happy it was able to be salvaged as I was quite pleased with the images for my second attempt at a nightscape!

Thanks again for your time folks  

[ollypenrice]

1 hour ago, Mike73 said:

The best way by far for blending tricky foreground and sky together is by using Luminosity masks.

I'II come back to this later as I'm just heading off to work now but in the meantime take a look at this video it should help.

 

The problem here, though, is that the guy in the video is able to slide the stars downwards behind a fixed foreground.  We can't do that with the OP's image because lots of sky is visible below the horizontal branches...

1 hour ago, fwm891 said:

I've used the two images in PS and treated them with layer masks after selecting, then cutting out the sky in one. Reversing the selection expanding the selction by 1 pixel and deleting the forground. Then getting as much as possible from each before flattening and rescling.

Hope you like

Heh heh, that's lovely, Francis. Chapeau, as they say over here!

Olly

[Mike73]

7 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

The problem here, though, is that the guy in the video is able to slide the stars downwards behind a fixed foreground.  We can't do that with the OP's image because lots of sky is visible below the horizontal branches...

You are completely right, I can get a really good mask of the foreground and trees but the star layer is a real problem. Getting a tracked star image with a clear horizon would certainly make things easier or maybe even just stacking the stars instead of a tracked star image?

[Iem1]

I tried a few times to get blend it together using different methods and struggled a lot, need more experience in PS I think before I can hope to tackle it.

In the end I gave up and used @fwm891 magnificent work and attempted to add a personal touch to it, hope you don't mind

settled with this;

 

I quite like the dark and subtle foreground effect...with the added bonus of hiding my mistakes too  I had a proper play around the trees with masks, adjusting Exposure/colour balance trying to make it all click. I am super happy with the result! Second ever nightscape, and, with a little (A LOT) of help from SGL friends, it looks great! Thanks again guys, really appreciate it.

Makes it more rewarding that this was a last ditched effort on the way back after spending 2-3 hours at another location trying to get something to work. 

This was my first attempt at a nightscape;

this was 60 seconds tracked sky and 60 seconds untracked foreground, was much much easier to blend for sure. Nice and flat! 

[rickwayne]

If you're going to try to select with a complex border such as foliage, I can heartily recommend Topaz ReMask. There are probably other tools that do the same thing but this one makes it super-simple. You just paint the border with a fairly wide brush and it computes a mask for you. It also has tools for refining the mask if the algorithm doesn't get it quite right (too greedy or too lazy).