This tutorial will cover the development of my image Milky Way from Apollo Bay using a Canon 350D, a wide angle lens, Adobe Photoshop and an image alignment program called hugin.
For this to be repeatable you must be shooting with clear dark skies, free from light pollution. I used settings of Tv: 20 sec, Av: f/4, focal length: 17mm and ISO speed: 1600. A shutter release cable is also a great tool and can keep your camera clicking as it sits on the tripod. The more images taken, the better for the final result, because this will improve the signal to noise ratio that plagues digital sensors during long exposures. A tracking mount is not necessary with a 20 second shutter speed because the rotation of the night sky is undetectable at such a wide angle.
Please read the following steps for more information. All images are hyperlinked to larger sizes.
1. Download this zipped folder containing four of my unaligned shots of the Milky Way.
2. Load them into hugin_0.7_beta_4 .
3. Manually align images with control points – don’t automatically align. I aligned three images to a common one. Enlarge the screenshot for details.
4. Click Edit – fine tune all points.
5. Click View – preview window.
6. Click Center and Fit buttons to achieve this view:
7. Click Edit – Optimise.
8. Click Stitcher – image format – multiple tiff. Final screen before clicking Stitch Now.
9. If you don’t want to worry about learning how to align the images with hugin, then you can download this zipped folder containing the four prealigned images of the Milky Way.
10. Load each image onto a new layer in photoshop adjusting the blend mode to screen which is good at lightening images without lightening the darkest areas.
11. Add a medium contrast curves layer.
12. Add a colour balance layer: shadows (-90,-25,-10), midtones (-15,-5,-20), highlights (0,-5,30).
13. The final result.
For comparison’s sake, shown below is a typical accompanying jpeg to a raw file I began with for one of the individual images. I used Adobe Camera Raw to extract the jpegs provided in step 1 for processing.
In closing, I’d like to point out this is not the only way an image like this can be captured; there is myriads of possibilities. I have developed this simple and inexpensive method by just experimenting with the tools at my disposal.
would you get the same effect from just using auto align layers in photoshop and having each layer at a low opacity?
I imagine they are being overlayed to try and soften out the noise.
I used hugin to customise the control points for image alignment. On your suggestion, I tried the PS auto align function (File > Scripts > Load files into Stack). It had trouble in the corners, the centre is fine. For ‘cleaner’ photographs I assume the auto align script would be fine.
As for the opacities, that was the first thing that I tried. It doesn’t seem to have the same averaging effect to reduce the noise as what changing the blend mode to ’screen’ does.
Feel free to download and try for yourself. Cheers for the suggestion.
*edit*
With a bit more playing around I see that you can select the aligned layers and convert them into a Smart Object (Layer > Smart Objects > Convert to Smart Object). A good method of reducing the noise is by using the Mean or Median stack mode (Layer > Smart Objects > Stack Mode).
It looks amazing! But 1 question, the individual 4 unaligned image looks very good, how can u make them so bright comparing to the last pic u show above?
many thx
kwok
I used ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) to extract the individual 4 unaligned images from their respective RAW files. In ACR I tweaked the exposure, brightness, contrast etc. to obtain a desirable result – nothing out of the ordinary.
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Неплохой пост, но много лишнего.
Это только то, чтобы рассмотреть.
I noticed you said you had settings of both Tv and Av. How many of each did you take of each and did you add them together in hugin?
i had the camera in manual mode and they were the individual settings for the time value (Tv) and aperture value (Av). i took only 4 shots with those settings. for less noisy results, of course take more. i only used the old version of hugin to align the shots. for some reason i couldn’t get good alignment with photoshop’s auto align feature. feel free to download the images to try yourself (if you haven’t done so already).
cool pic. Photoshops austoalign feature seems to be rather hit and miss the few times i’ve used it.
yeah, the stitch and merge to hdr functions have also failed to be robust enough for continued use – i don’t know anyone who uses them or how anyone could for an attractive result.
Thanks for the guide. I used it to shoot my first night photo of Kassiopeia. I used ImageJ afterwards to stack the prealigned images. (http://g-oe-m.blogspot.com/2009/08/sternenhimmel-fotographiert-kassiopeia.html)
Thanks for the feedback Juergen. I read your post and saw your picture. I suggest for you to try it again but increase the sensitivity of your camera next time. That way you might be able to see some more detail.
Hey,
Thanks for your tutorial. I followed it this weekend, and tried my own shot of milky way since it was a new mooon.
It was my first attempt ever, so I’m ok with the results. One mistake I made was I just took the accompanying jpegs and put them into hugin/ps, I should have done the settings on the .cr2 files first. I will try this and hopefully get better results.
thanks for the great tutorial
great – let me know if you put it online anywhere so i can check it out
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Nice job!
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cool!!! :) I´ll try this one as soon as I get my hands on one of those wide angle lenses…jajaja
thanks!!!!
enjoy!
Python27.dll is missing on Win7 64bit. I get this error when I try to start hugin. Have you used Photomatix HDR for this task?
Python27 can be found here for 64bit Win7
http://www.python.org/download/
Thank you for sharing how to edit the milky way photography. Such a kind of you. Just want to ask ; we need to get multiple photos before we get a single good one? Can we edit it from one photos only? If we can, can you show it for me. Thank you.
Note : I have some single photos, but didn’t know how to do with it.
If you have a really expensive modern camera (low noise at high iso speed) with a wide and fast lens then it’s possible to use only one image. This post is for people who don’t have access to expensive equipment but would still like to capture the night sky.
Thanks this is a great tutorial and an amazing photograph! Inspiring work!
Thanks so much for this tutorial! This is exactly what I’m looking for.
I just bought my first SLR and went head first into trying capturing the milky way. My images came out somewhat like your comparison photo and I’m so glad that you posted that image because I was somewhat bummed. That image really shows the power of the RAW format & post-processing! I really need to learn how to use CameraRAW now!
Good to know Jared. I usually avoid post-processing myself (boring…) but in this case it has such a dramatic effect on the final result.
WOW – this worked flawlessly. We now have milky way photos. Thanks for the instructions
My pleasure!
Would any photo editing system do? I know, it seems like an idiotic question, but it’s been nagging at me, lol.
And thanks so much for the tutorial! I’ve been trying to get into astrophotography for a while now and have never been able to photograph it at all
Good software to process your RAW files is crucial. You can see that the lack of useful information in the accompanying jpeg is quite apparent above.