I hope astro-landscapes are allowed in this category, apologies if this is the wrong place to post.
I finally got a chance to go up to Rocky Mountain National Park and re-shoot a composition I shot last year. I’m very happy with the end result but I’m curious to see what you all think.
What technical feedback would you like if any?
Does it look crooked? I’ve been staring at it too long and can’t tell anymore
Is the composition right-heavy? Should I crop off the left area more?
What artistic feedback would you like if any?
Is the saturation of the reflection good? Too little?
Does any part of the frame look unnatural? I did some cloning but I won’t say where
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Oh my, this is lovely. The reflection of the sky is very cool. The stars in the sky look quite sharp, but the reflected stars don’t. Is that from the water moving?
I do have the impression that it’s tilted down to the left a bit. It’s that faint line of lightness between the mountains and the water that looks tilted down. And the composition is a bit heavy frame right. The dark mass of the flat mountain and the milky way in the sky put most of the visual mass on the right. To my eye, cropping off the right would balance it better than cropping off the left. If you crop off the left, there will be even more weight on the right, unbalanced by open area on the left, if that makes sense. You’d lose some nice stars, but cropping at the break in slope of the right hand mountain looks more balanced to me.
You have found the right place for astro Chris. This is really nice, I like the twilight look to go along with the Milky Way. This is a little different than many MW images in that regard, but it works really well for me.
It is slightly tilted down to the left, I took it into Photoshop and superimposed a grid to confirm. I like the white balance you used, I prefer MW images to be blue but you achieved a nice nice balance here with the yellow clouds and sky highlights. Saturation looks good to me, to my taste you could even increase blue saturation a small amount. I do not think the composition is right heavy, this comp looks nicely balanced to me. I would not crop more from the left, those tree silhouettes are great.
One thing I might suggest is to selectively darken the darker areas of the gas cloud to add a little more contrast to the MW. If you use luminosity masks a D2 or D3 selection and a burn layer should do the trick.
This gets very subjective in terms of personal taste, but to me there is slightly too much noise in the bottom half of the image, especially in the water. The sky however looks great. If you don’t want to degrade the star reflections, you could try applying blurring or noise reduction to the bottom half, but masking it into only the dark areas using a Darks luminosity mask selection, this usually works pretty well at keeping highlights (star reflections) crisper looking.
These suggestions are only tweaks intended to take a great image up another notch, overall I like it a lot.
A most beautiful night sky image and yes, this is the perfectly appropriate place to post. Back in the old days of the original NPN, this critique category was called, “Earth, Sea and Sky.” So you’re good.
Great observations so far. I love the sky and especially that you were able to include some clouds. Is this a little right heavy? sure, I guess. The good thing that I like as is though are the trees and their reflection on the left. At first I was having a hard time lining up the stars in the water with the real ones in the sky. I think they line up and I suspect slight movement in the water made the reflected stars change shape and size a little? But then your comment about cloning makes me wonder… the reflection?
I think a crop might work, although it would be fairly drastic - cropping to a square starting from the right. This would eliminate the trees on the left - mostly… but where I would draw the crop there would still be a few trees just breaking the ridge line and reflection. Might have to do some cloning with this option.
Honestly, I’m really enjoying this one as presented.
Thank you all for the critiques, I really appreciate it! I definitely have some more to play around with in this image now
@Bonnie_Lampley Good point about what is making this right heavy, I never thought about cropping off from the right to balance it more. The flat topped mountain definitely has a lot of visual weight though, I will play with cropping off the right some more I guess I was concerned about the milky way being too far to the right, I like how it starts at 2/3 of the way through the image and ends around 1/3.
@Ed_McGuirk Do you superimpose the grid view on crop mode in photoshop? I seem to have trouble straightening my images a lot so I’m open to some tips :P.
I actually cropped some trees off from the left from the original framing, do you think I should move the crop over a bit to get rid of more of the mountain on the right and show more trees on the left?
Great idea on the noise reduction, I already applied a bit more noise reduction to the foreground than to the sky but not selectively as you had mentioned. I held back on the noise reduction in the foreground because the brighter areas would be too blurry, but only applying it to the darks will work really well!
@Lon_Overacker Good to hear, I thought I had seen some night sky images here before but wasn’t sure
I think the differences between star locations in the reflection and the sky may have been due to stitching the panorama. I guess I should have mentioned earlier but this was made from stitching three frames together composed of four images each for stacking (total of 12 images). It’s very likely that either the stitching or the time between each frame caused some inconsistencies. Do you think the reflection looks unnatural, or are the stars in the reflection close enough to where they should be? The cloning was mostly around the edges; most of it being on the right edge. No major cloning in the water though, just a bit on the lower left corner.
I will play around with a square crop as you have mentioned. I was thinking of doing that originally but settled on a 4x5 because I wanted to keep the trees in.
I just went into PS and did View / Show / Grid to prove that there was a minor tilt. There might be a way to do that from crop, but I’ve not used it.
Personally I could see adding a little to the left, and cropping a bit from the right. This moves you more towards a symmetrical composition, some folks like that, some don’t, it’s subjective.
If you use a luminosity mask panel like TK Actions it is easy to do, use say a Darks 3 selection to mask in noise reduction only to the darkest areas, this usually keeps stars sharp. I also use this same approach to darken the blue areas of night sky without reducing exposure in stars, it’s a way to add contrast in the sky.
Quite beautiful, thanks for posting.
Images can look un level when reflections don’t line up. You can check that with the edge of a crop tool box. It can become about creating a least / best looking amount of distortion across the image.
The straight line (far right top of land) kind of stands out, maybe alter it. It may look better without that one brightest star in the sky.
TY
Really nice frame, Chris. And nice pinpoint stars in the sky. I echo many of the sentiments above, but the one thing I’ll add that I don’t believe has been mentioned yet is the foreground exposure. I’m not sure if the files you have will allow it without adding too much noise, but I find myself wanting to be able to see a bit more of the mountain landscape, which is very dark right now. I personally always struggle with how bright the foreground should be in my Milky Way shots, but I think you can brighten up the mountains up in this one a bit while still maintaining the nighttime feel.
Thanks @Kevin_D_Jordan, I originally planned to take the foreground from a few frames I shot earlier in the night when the moon was out but merging those into a pano wasn’t working. I’ll see if I can brighten up the foreground in the files I have though!
