The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
One of several lighted targets we had on the recent workshop. There was no sign of the smoke from the previous night at Mono Lake.
Specific Feedback
All comments welcome!
Technical Details
Maybe I should relent on slightly longer star trails. This one was very underexposed, even after trying a 20 sec exposure for the FG. Surprisingly, it proved no better than using NR on the 8 sec version. Minimal adjustments in LR; into PS for separation and minimizing of stars and tonal work on the starless sky BG. Some burning of the FG lights.
Critique Template
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Diane, these are a great set of photos, but I keep wondering why there are so few stars. I notice the total light received is roughly the same for the 3 posted. Is it something in the processing or did you intend showing few stars?
Diane, I kept wondering as Rob has, why there are so few stars in your MW shots and came to the conclusion that it’s your noise reduction, either in how far you are taking it or the program itself.
In this shot, and mind you, this was a very early attempt in the shooting aspect of doing a 6 shot vertical pano without using a nodal bar…oops, but the magic of PS and for noise reduction in ON1 I was able to “fix” the image.
My noise reduction is quite a bit sharper than yours, which I find too soft because the softening makes over half of the available stars go away, so to speak. Anyway, it’s a thought to consider. Maybe one day I will get to shoot the MW again with all the right tools.
@Rob_Sykes and @Chris_Calohan – thanks! It’s not my NR – quite the contrary. In the last few years software has been written for PixInsight (the pro tool for telescope astrophotography) that does a remarkable job of removing stars. Telescopes capture the pinpoint light of stars far better than any camera lens, and give lovely soft round stars. But even in that world, star removal has become a routine processing step to allow noise reduction and nebula structure to be brought out without damaging stars. And even in this world dedicated to digging out detail with accuracy, it is not unusual now to see stars minimized or completely starless images.
I am completely unhappy with the stars I capture with any lens I have tried – they are plagued with several types of lens artifacts and wide angle distortion. And this relatively new lens may become my next paperweight. So I am trying a star removal workflow. That enables noise reduction on the empty sky and tonal work on the Milky Way structure, and separate improvement of the stars. Then they are recombined. I’m still experimenting with the workflow on both layers. I’m definitely still working on both better stars and better definition of the dust lanes.
I don’t care for the relative paucity of stars to the left of the galactic center, but that is the distribution there. Stars are just not evenly distributed. But I’m thinking of brushing away some of the minimalization in that area.
Here are some quick screenshots. Maybe I should try some NR and sharpening before removing the stars.
Here’s the area:
The unadjusted raw file with horrible stars even this close to the center of the lens:
I didn’t do any frequency work on yours because it is a jpeg and however nice, it doesn’t act like a .tiff or Raw file. It’s funny, not haha but more hmmmmmmm, that you see the starts as soft balls of light which makes me wonder how I’ve gotten it wrong all these years. Hmmmmmmmmm
The above were with a 400mm equivalent “astrograph” (flat-field corrected) refractor telescope and an astro camera. But that’s what stars are capable of. When you look at your raw captures at 100% do you see pinpoint stars in the corners? If so I’d like to borrow your lens.
I must admit I like the stars with your more modest equipment - it seems more natural to me. I use rather modest equipment - a Canon 90D crop sensor, Sigma 17 (25mm eq) to 70mm F2.8 and a Sigma 10 - 20mm F3.5 I also use a star filter (aka light pollution filter) that uses about half a stop. I am not shooting anywhere as wide as you unless I stitch.
I normally use *10 screen magnification when I focus, however my biggest aha moment was when I started using really close range spectacles when manually focusing. I could see even the smallest tweak could change the shape of the stars in the corners and center. I have no pin points in the corners of my photos. The bright stars also suffer chromatic aberration.
I do not believe we are able to counteract the distortion the Earth’s atmosphere introduces or the over exposed bigger stars. Some dark sky nights are simply better than others. I would expect a full frame camera to do better than my crop sensor in the over exposed bigger stars department.
Thumbs up on the “AHA moment”, @Rob_Sykes! Every lens I have tried is very sensitive to focus and it takes the highest magnification (and the best reading glasses) to see it. And it isn’t even across the frame, much less from the center out. I shudder when I see advice to use focus peaking.
You are quite right about even the best-focused stars being softened by the atmosphere. The Clear Dark Skies forecasts attempt to predict “seeing” which is reduced by atmospheric turbulence. High end astro cameras are focused with electronic focusers, which maximize the narrowness of a gaussian curve of the blur – the point spread function.
In astro captures the exposure is held down enough that some star color is captured, but at the expense of very underexposed structures like nebulae and dust lanes. Hours of these underexposures are captured and stacked for NR, then the resulting image (with stars removed in the latest workflows) stretched hugely and processed for microcontrast, then the stars added back.
I’m hoping to be able to push regular captures in that direction. So far, it’s not so far. The best solution is don’t look at a 100% view. I don’t know the stats but I doubt there is much more than a stop of dynamic range on a full-frame sensor compared to APS-C. And very dependent on the sensor technology of course.
