Advice on editing a Milky Way landscape please

[the lemming]

I’ve got my RAW image, what can I do in editing to make the image look good both printed and displayed on a screen?

I’ve had about five or six attempts to try and capture a Milky Way landscape and a couple of days ago I got an image that I am pleased with.

All I need to do now is edit the image as best as possible. Here is my attempt at the image however I’d like to improve on my edit.

 

[clarkpm4242]

Have you looked at Alyn Wallace, Richard Tatti, John Rutter on YouTube, there are many others - search for 'editing Milky Way in Photoshop' or app of your choice.

[900SL]

What software do you have? For MW I use lightroom, affinity photo and starless++ 

[the lemming]

On 06/09/2022 at 11:01, 900SL said:

What software do you have? For MW I use lightroom, affinity photo and starless++ 

At the moment I have:

DxO Photolabs 5 (Free Trial at the moment) It is awsome for Noise Reduction and killing Hot Pixels

Lightroom 5.7 because I refuse to pay monthly for Adobe software.

Topaz Sharpen and DeNoise

Luminar 4 and Luminar Neo

Gimp (Not so good at killing Hot Pixels)

Sequator

Starstax

[ollypenrice]

The most obvious thing to do would be to lose the very significant excess of green. Any imaging editing suite will let you do this, but here's a quick play in Photoshop. This may be too much but green astro skies are a big no-no. I'd normally use Pixinsight's SCNR green but didn't here. There is also Hasta La Vista green from the Deep Sky Colors website.

Then you might think about the reflections. The water seems to have un-tracked stars while the sky has tracked ones. This is disturbing to the eye. I'd probably address this by removing the trailed stars on the water (clone stamp) and replacing them with the stars from the tracked sky shot which I assume will be tight and round. But maybe the elongation on the reflected stars is from the angle from camera to water? I don't know.

Olly

 

Edited September 24, 2022 by ollypenrice