Landscape with brightness masks

In a previous story

We’ve covered how to prepare and shoot a beautiful night landscape, and now we’re going to learn how to process it in an interesting way. So, the camera is exposed, the test shot is very interesting? What to do now? To take nine to ten pictures of exactly the same image. Why would you want to do that?? No matter how cool, noisy your full frame camera is, it will still make some noise at such high ISO. We need the same series of frames to subtract noise and enhance the signal.

Nikon D850 AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED f/2.8, 30 sec, ISO 3200.

One of the original shots in the series. High ISO, lots of noise, ugly light. We need to do something with it.

So we’ve done the cycle of shots, now we return from the cold nighttime street to the warm house, sleep it off and sit down to process. Let’s take a close look at our original photos. It seems to be quite good, but we have to get rid of the noise and the stars should be shown. We load a series of frames into Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW ACR and process them exactly the same way, it is important for us to get a perfect reproduction of each other. Be sure to go to the tab Detail and set the Color and Luminance noise reduction to zero. We will fight noise in a different way.

Now we have a series of processed frames where we need to remove the noise. Is it possible to use the method of median addition, which I described in one of the lessons in this photography school? And yes and no. The method does a good job of scrubbing the noises from the ground. Problems will show up in the sky, because the stars shift from exposure to exposure, which means the program will subtract them from the processing. You can try splitting the frame into half with the ground and half with the sky, half with the sky automatically aligned with the Auto-AlignLayers tool and then subtract the noise only from the sky. But unfortunately, the PictureShot is very bad at equalizing more than four pictures taken with a wide-angle lens 14mm in this case . We’ll have to find some other way.

And it is there, but as part of additional programs that analyze photos, find the sky on them, separate it from the ground, automatically align the stars in all photos of the series and subtract the noise. A completely free Sequator is available for Windows users /data/away/bbcab6737d612617de65e6cd6e8b1a50/ . Mac users like me will have to pay for StarryLandscapeStacker.

Let’s see the process of getting rid of the noise with the last one.Let’s save all our files in 16 bit tiff in a separate folder and open the Starry Landscape Stacker. The program will at once request the files for merging and in reply we will give it the saved tiff files.

After a brief analysis, let’s mark the supposed stars on the photo with the red dots. At this point you need to erase those points that are not stars, but you don’t need to finish drawing anything new. In my case, the program marked a lot of unnecessary, so I had to spend time cleaning up.

The main window of Starry Landscape Stacker.

Star markers are marked in red

Once the anchor points are fixed, you can press the Find Sky button to let the program detect the ground and the sky and create a mask for the sky. The SLS is usually pretty good at this job, but in this case it left a lot of empty areas. At this stage it is important to shade only the areas where the stars really are – it is not necessary to shade the clouds on the horizon. It will be even better if the program applies to them the algorithms for the ground, it will remove the noise more effectively.

The blue color indicates a mask for the sky, created automatically by the program and after its manual refinement

When you can manage with the mask, you can press the AlignandSave button. The program aligns the photos and subtracts the noise, and then saves the result in a folder with the sources in 16-bit tiff.

Now you can open the resulting file in PhotoShore and put some finishing touches. So, I wanted to take a picture of the stars. For this, I used the DelailExtractor filter from the NikColorEfex selection. This set has been completely free to download for about a year now, so I highly recommend downloading it for yourself.

Final Photo