Archive 2022 · Dream Lake with Milky Way

The Rat
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Dream Lake with Milky Way

2AM wakeup this morning, but the weather looked like it would be clear and according to Photopills, the Milky Way would be aligned roughly 4-430AM over Dream Lake. So here we go.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52243579495_c78eab0309_h.jpg

C&C is welcome! I used DxO Photolab for processing, and tried to keep my adjustments conservative, closer to what I saw with my eyes. Don't have as much experience processing moonless night skies and didn't want to overcook it.

Jul 26, 2022 at 07:48 PM

Bill Gass
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Dream Lake with Milky Way

Looks like your upload size or compressed/uncompressed file is making it blurry and a little painterly like. Maybe resize it and upload again ?

Jul 26, 2022 at 09:08 PM

The Rat
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Dream Lake with Milky Way

Bill Gass wrote:
Looks like your upload size or compressed/uncompressed file is making it blurry and a little painterly like. Maybe resize it and upload again ?

Hmm, so I tried tweaking with the sharpening settings to see if that's what was doing it, and didn't notice a difference. Then I looked at the export options, which had interpolation settings of bicubic, bicubic sharper, and bilinear. I hadn't messed with that before, and it was always on bicubic. So I did an export on each function to see if there was a difference. The only difference I found was that in bicubic sharpener, the stars were a little brighter:

https://i.imgur.com/7bG2r2W.jpg

Do you think the blurry/painterly look could be from having missed the focus? I was trying to focus so that the stars would be as clear as they could, but that may have impacted the landscape.

Jul 27, 2022 at 07:27 AM

liftedspirit
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Dream Lake with Milky Way

The painterly effect appears to be from noise as well. I might try denoising the landscape. Denoising the stars is always a risky proposition as you can remove stars.

I don't shoot much milky way anymore, but when I did I would typically attempt two exposures - one for the stars and another for the non-stars with focus (and exposure) potentially differing for the two.

(Bierstadt Lake is another nice spot in the park for Milky Ways)

Jul 29, 2022 at 10:53 AM

The Rat
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off

p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Dream Lake with Milky Way

liftedspirit wrote:
The painterly effect appears to be from noise as well. I might try denoising the landscape. Denoising the stars is always a risky proposition as you can remove stars.

I don't shoot much milky way anymore, but when I did I would typically attempt two exposures - one for the stars and another for the non-stars with focus (and exposure) potentially differing for the two.

(Bierstadt Lake is another nice spot in the park for Milky Ways)

Hmm, that's a good point. I'll have to check when I get home if I can apply DxO's Deep Prime denoising to just the landscape and not the stars via the local adjustments.

Jul 29, 2022 at 11:20 AM


FM Forums \| Landscape Photographer \| Join Upload & Sell

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.