I took this image from a time lapse I shot in Hamnøy, Lofoten last October. I look forward to seeing your edits 
IMG_0002.CR3 (34.2 MB)
You may only download this file to demonstrate how you would process the image. The file is Copyright of the photographer, and you must delete the raw file when you are done. Please post a jpg of what you created, explain what you did, and why you did it.
Since I haven’t seen the northern lights, I have no idea what should or should not look… but I envision a more neutral sky (is the green EVERYWHERE? I just don’t know). I also opened the shadows some. The green light probably is being reflected in the shadows and there must be some other warm light on the tall mountain on the right. Overall a challenge photo… and when I opened up the shadows, with a fair amount of noise (which I didn’t remove but could). I also didn’t touch out the sign…
Hi, @bill_theis Depending on the intensity of the Aurora you can see more or less green light reflected in the shadows. The mountain on the right is warmer because it is being illuminated by a small town called Hamnøy. The sky is usually a little greener I would say. Sorry for the high noise and the sign, I used f2.8 and ISO 4000 for this image so that the exposure time would not be too high and I could take more images in less time since it was intended for a timelapse at first.
thanks for the education on aurora casting it’s light everywhere, making green shadows. I tried to get color separation from the green aurora and the black sky but having not seen it did not know that the aurora green was everywhere and there is no black sky to be seen. it’s on my bucket list to see them. noise (and signs) cannot be avoided. fortunately there are photoshop cures for those. getting the feel of the aurora is tantamount.
Hello Nicolas,
Thank you for allowing us to process your image. I don’t know if I will ever get a chance to witness the northern lights in my life time so it was a pleasure to work on this image.
So in ACR I opened the blacks to 100 and the shadows to about 30. I reduced the exposure by 1/3 of a stop. I increased the contrast a bit and reduced the highlights a bit. I kept the white balance as shot. Then in the Calibration I increased the saturation on the blue and green channel while reducing the red channel. Then I brought it into PS as a smart object. I cloned out the sign, but I did not do as good a job as you did. I did a sky selection and then increased the contrast. I selected the sky once again, inverted it and then used that selection to burn down the mountain on the right and the foreground to give it a little darker feel as it is a night photo. I then did a color selection of the reflection of the water and dodged it to bring the luminance up. resized and sharpened for the web, converted the profile to sRGB and saved it as a JPEG.
Again thank you for the opportunity.
Youssef
Hi, Youssef! I hope you find the way to see the auroras!
By the way awesome editing! I think you did a good job in general and specially with the foreground and the mountain. I usually leave the foregrounds brighter than what they look like in reality. I’ll have to pay attention to this in the next night images. About the sign, I used generate to refill in PS, it really is a tool that does its job very well.
Thanks to you for taking the time to edit the image!
