Hi guys. Welcome to another Pangolin Photo tutorial.
My name is Sabine and as promised today I'm going to show you
how i merge these single exposures into one beautiful panorama of the Milky Way.
I've recently taken these images on a
trip to Kubu island with my friends and colleagues from Pangolin Photo
Safaris. While we were there we also made a really nice video on how
to shoot the stars, including star trails, long exposures of the night sky,
and some fun light painting techniques.
If you haven't seen the video yet please make sure to check the link above
and have a look.
In this episode, I'm going to show you
how i stitch the single exposures into one panorama
using adobe lightroom's photo merge feature.
Afterwards, I'm going to take the panorama into Photoshop
to fix some of the distortion and uneven horizon
plus get rid of some of the light pollution in the background
and as a last step i'm going to show you my final edit
back in Adobe Lightroom.
All right let's jump right into Lightroom. I have the images open
in my Lightroom catalogue and I'm going to head into the develop mode
to prepare the images for the photo merge.
I'm gonna open the lens corrections tab and then I'm gonna check the two boxes
that will automatically fix the lens distortion
and remove the chromatic aberration if there's any.
After that, i'll bring up the exposure about one stop
just to see a bit easier. That is not a necessary step. That is just my personal preference.
Just to see a little bit what's going on in the image.
and now it's time to apply these adjustments to all of the images.
So I'm going to right-click on the adjusted image and choose develop
settings > copy settings. Make sure that everything is checked and
then select the rest of the images. Right-click once again
and go to develop settings > paste settings.
And now we have a good base to start our panorama stitch.
Select all images, right-click and select photo merge panorama. Lightroom now
generates a preview of the merged version and you have
a few options to choose from. The projection mode I usually leave on
spherical as that seems to give me the most
natural results without any stretching and if you look at the preview now
you can see that lots of my milky way and the foreground has disappeared
due to the auto-crop feature being checked.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to uncheck auto-crop
and "voila" I have my foreground and a complete milky way back.
I leave the apply auto settings and create stack features enabled.
Now this is just my personal preference
but especially creating a stack keeps your library nice and tidy
as it stacks all the single exposures behind your merged panorama.
Now it still looks a bit messy and my panorama is not quite finished yet.
To bring the image now into photoshop all we need to do is right click on the
image and say edit in Adobe Photoshop.
Let me just speed up the opening process not to keep you waiting.
Now with the image open in Photoshop make sure that your layer shows layer 0.
Sometimes it is labeled as background which means that the layer is locked.
To unlock simply double click on the layer and it becomes a layer 0 just
like in my case. OK, let's go ahead and duplicate our
layer by pressing ctrl j on a PC
or command j on a Mac
and then we go up to edit > transform > rotate. So I want to make the horizon
a little bit more straight and as a guideline i'm going to take
down my ruler. If you haven't got your rulers enabled
simply go up to view and click on rulers
So I'm just gonna rotate the image until it is more or less straight
according to my ruler and after i'm gonna head up to this icon here
which is the transform warp tool. So we're still in the transform tool and
we're just changing it now to warp. If you look here you can see these
points or handles. So what we can do now is drag around on
these handles to get rid of some of the distortion in
the image. If you look at the Milky Way you see
it's quite bent in a distorted way. So I'm just going to
drag the handles up a little bit stretching the Milky Way
and also looking at my trees while I'm dragging
trying to get the distortion out of the trees
and my horizon a little bit more straight
Now there's no
specific recipe on how you need to drag the handles around to get the
perfect result. It's merely a thing of looking at the
image while you do it and drag until you're happy with
the appearance and confirm the transform warp by
hitting Enter.
Alright let's go ahead and flatten the
image before we apply the next step. Once again I need to unlock my layer by
double clicking on it and then after i'm going to head up to
the crop tool and make sure that we clear
any crop dimensions so that we can be flexible
on how we crop in the sides of the image. It is tempting to just crop out
these white parts completely but i do want a bit of extra space next
to my trees on each side giving a bit of breathing room.
So I'm just gonna crop as it looks right to me with the trees
even though i still have those two little white areas.
Luckily Photoshop has a really easy way to fix that. Let me show you.
First, I'm gonna duplicate my layer again
and then i'm going to head up to the lasso tool
and make a selection of the white area on the left.
Now comes the magic. Head up to the edit and choose
"content aware fill" from the drop-down menu.
You can see in the preview window that it did a great job filling the white
area with similar color and texture which is indicated as the sampling area
by the green colour in the window on the left.
So if by default your program is doing a good enough job in automatically
detecting and replacing the area. All you need to
do is hit apply and OK. Now we just need to
repeat the same for the second white patch on the right.
make sure though that you're working on your working layer and not
on the new layer that was created just now. So i'm going to speed this up a
little bit but you can see photoshop once again did
a great job in filling the white area. Now my problem is gone and I can flatten
the image again. My last step in Photoshop will be
removing some of the light pollution in the background.
To do that i'm going to unlock my layer once again.
Duplicate the layer. Then working on the duplicate
I'm going ahead and use Photoshop's Clone Stamp tool.
You might want to adjust the brush size while working.
Choose a sample area by holding ALT on a PC
or OPTION on the Mac while you sample the area.
Then you click on the bright areas or simply the areas that you want to
have replaced. I'm going to speed up again and now that
we're done in Photoshop all we need to do is go to file and say save.
That will save the edited version as a
tiff file back in lightroom where i'm gonna now walk you through my
final edit of the panorama.
In the basic panel of the develop mode
i'll drag the whites to the right and the blacks to the left
to let the stars pop some more. I personally like to keep some detail in
the foreground so I'm also going to brighten the
shadows a little bit.
Let's add a tad of extra contrast. Usually, I don't like to push the
contrast too much on the overall image.
Now I rather enhance the contrast some more using local adjustments. Before I get to
that though let's have a look at the colours.
To start my edit on a neutral colour balance I'm gonna momentarily bring the vibrance
and saturation slider to plus 100. That gives me a good idea of what is
going on in the image and as you can see blue is quite dominant in my picture.
So I'm going to go to my temperature slider and bring that towards the yellow side
until i get a good balance between blue and yellow.
Now let me reset vibrance and saturation again
and as you can see I now have a nice neutral base to start my colour edit.
OK. Time to do some local adjustments.
First I'll grab the graduated filter and make a selection of the sky only.
The easiest way to do that is to use the range mask feature
within the graduated filter and if you click it you get different options.
For this scenario, i'm going to choose luminance.
To see which area has been selected, I'm going to choose to show luminance mask
which will indicate in a red color the selected areas and as you can see
actually right now part of the trees and the foreground has been selected as
well and I don't want that. So what I can do is I can change the
range of the luminance and by just dragging the slider you can
see now my trees and the foreground are
appearing in black which means they are not
in my selection anymore. Once you apply the effect it's best to uncheck "show
luminance mask" again so now that you can see what you are
working on. To adjust the colors in the sky i'll
bring the temperature slider towards blue
and the tint a bit towards green as i prefer a slight
cooler more bluish look in the sky. I'm also going to darken the sky by moving
the exposure slider to the left and I'll increase the contrast and once
again the whites and the blacks for a more dramatic look.
I'll also increase clarity and dehaze. It's always a good idea to switch the
filter on and off just to see the before and after.
Actually, if I look at my image I feel that my graduated filter
needs to move a little bit more down as I've missed part of the horizon.
OK. I'm happy with that so let's move on and create another graduated filter.
This time for the lower part of the sky only.
As I do not want to affect the foreground once again
I'll enable the range mask and set the range accordingly.
That looks about right but I want a bit more sky in my selection
so I'm just going to expand my graduated filter slightly upwards.
I want to do two things here. I want to give the lower part of the sky
a cooler temperature and i want to lower the highlights.
Both are results of the light pollution in the background and are quite easy to
fix that way.
Now it's time to make the Milky Way pop.
To do that i'll grab the adjustment brush
and roughly brush over the Milky Way. I'd suggest you use a feather amount of 100
to let the effects fade into the rest of the image
and make it look a little bit more natural.
Hit O o the keyboard to get rid of the red overlay to see the adjustments that you're about to make.
First I'll adjust the exposure to the right
to brighten it. Then I'm going to increase the contrast
some more and the whites and blacks once again.
The advantage of using these local adjustments
instead of using the overall sliders is that you can focus the viewer's eye
intentionally at a specific area in the image.
In this case, of course, the Milky Way. I'll also increase
texture, clarity and dehaze. Plus a little bit of extra saturation.
If you scroll down within the adjustment brush tab you will find an option
to colourise the selected area. Now this is definitely a personal choice
but I came to like using this method in editing my star images and i usually add
a little bit of a subtle warm orangey reddish tone to my Milky Way.
OK. Here again before and after and
you'll notice how much more prominent the Milky Way is.
Now after the adjustment's applied the next
step is also optional and completely up to your personal taste.
If you look here, you see certain clusters in the Milky Way
that are more colourful than others. With another adjustment brush, I'd
like to enhance these areas a little bit more.
So within the brush, I set my temperature and the tint to be a bit
warmer in tonality. I'll increase my exposure, clarity and saturation.
Then I'm going to brush over some of
these areas readjusting the brush size whenever I need it.
All right let's do one more adjustment brush
and in this adjustment brush, I'm actually
going to choose a preset which is called burn.
Essentially what it is it's just lowering the exposure
and then i'm going to brush over the parts of the Milky Way
that naturally appear already darker than others.
So i'm just going to enhance some of the local contrast
Let's have a look at some color adjustments by heading to the hsl color tab.
I'll start off with the Hue, manipulating
slightly how some of the colours appear. Since i might want to change a mixture
of colours rather than one solid colour - I'll make use of the targeted adjustment
tool indicated by this little icon and then clicking on different areas of
the image I'm going to drag my mouse up or down to
change the tonality of these colours until I'm happy with the appearance.
After I'm going to switch to the
saturation within the HSL color tab and do the same. Only this time i'm going
to change the saturation values for the specific colours.
For example, i don't like the heavy red/orange cast
in the lower part of the sky originating from the light pollution.
So I'm going to almost completely dial the saturation for these colors down.
If i look at the bluish tones in the sky I also
feel that is almost a little bit too saturated for my taste.
So I'm also going to lower these slightly
and then I'm gonna go to my magenta slider. I feel that the whole image is a
little bit too magenta and I'm gonna manually dial
that down as well. In the last step luminance, I can control
the brightness of certain colours. So clicking in one of the bluish areas
close to the Milky Way and dragging my mouse up i'm going to
increase the brightness to make the viewer's eye intentionally
being drawn a little bit more to the Milky Way.
Now another option we can use to adjust the colors
in our night sky is using the split toning tool.
Here we can individually introduce tones into the
highlights and the shadows by holding down ALT or option
we can select which color we want to introduce
and by moving the saturation slider underneath we
regulate the strength of how much of that tonality will be introduced
into our highlights or shadows. Obviously you need to be quite subtle here.
In this case I want a little bit more blue
in my highlights and then a bit of a warm
greenish tint to my shadows. Perfect all we need to do now is head
back to our basics panel and give our image a last boost by just
increasing the overall clarity and dehaze slider
as well as our vibrance and saturation.
All right i'm happy with that i'm not
going to mess with the settings any further.
All that is left to do is some sharpening and cleaning up some of the
noise so in the detail panel I'm only going to
select a slight amount of sharpening. As the default amount already has been
applied earlier I'm also going to use the masking slider
to mainly only select the stars and the tree outlines for
sharpening and I'm gonna slightly increase the
detail slider as well just to make my stars appear nice and crisp.
For the noise reduction, I tend to
increase the colour noise to about plus 100, in star images that is.
and additionally, I'm going to apply some luminance noise reduction
of about 10 on the overall image. Now the dark foreground is where the noise
is visible the most. So what i'm going to do is i'm going to
take another graduated filter with a range mask
set to luminance and now i only want to apply my
effects to the foreground and not the sky.
So I'm going to apply some more noise reduction
and now if I zoom in that looks much cleaner and better
and this is my final Milky Way panorama.
I really hope you guys
enjoyed this tutorial if you did please give us a thumbs up
and subscribe to our channel for more content.
I'll see you in the next episode.
Bye-bye.