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Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
At the end of the second day during my Yosemite Fall Excursion, We wandered the park looking for a location where we could take some starry sky photos. We tried the Tunnel View area, but found that the light coming from the tunnel itself spoiled the naturalness of the scene. Then we tried west of the tunnel and unfortunately that area was strangely completely covered by clouds. So I tried down at the bottom of the Valley at the edge of the Merced river at the Valley View location. Surprisingly, the sky was not completely covered and in fact the clouds that were hanging around the peaks added some character to the whole scene. I think some of the light coming from the tunnel was still illuminating the clouds on the right edge of the photo, and while not natural, I decided to keep that coloring adding to the mystery. The clouds further in were most likely lit by Yosemite Village and Curry Village.
I liked that I was able to capture the Pleiades near the URC, Jupiter glowing behind a small cloud mid way up and just off center to the right, Cappella in that subtle blue glow left of center, and what I think are three stars in Gemini poking through the clouds near the bottom in between El Capitan and Cathedral Rocks.
Specific Feedback
Putting aside the lens-coma generated star shapes, does the photograph have any visual appeal? Any thoughts on the colors either in the sky or in the clouds is appreciated.
Technical Details
Nikon D850, Nikon 24mm f/2 MF lens, wide open at f2 for 30 seconds at ISO 1600.
Processed in ACR, where I applied the new AI denoise filter and saved it as a DNG. other adjustments in ACR included setting the color balance and exposure.
Then in to PS for some final edits including a color grading of the sky and some contrast adjustments to darken the sky, and applied a slight Orton layer to give the stars a little bit of a glow.
I then did a 4x5 crop, removing the top as the lens coma was pretty awful. My 24mm f/2 lens while great for landscapes, is horrible wide open on the stars.
Critique Template
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- Vision and Purpose:
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I hate being thwarted by either extraneous light sources or cloud cover when making astro exposures. That said, though a relatively fast lens, a 24mm MF @ f/2 doesn’t appear to be super sharp. Part of the issue is the best aperture for maximum center sharpness is 2.8, though in both the 2.0 and 2.8 configurations, both barrel distortion and loss of contrast and sharpness at the edges is fairly pronounced. Another part of the issue is such a long exposure as to have long star commas. And finally, I wonder if your overall focus is as sharp as it could be.
@Chris_Calohan ,
Thank you for the feedback it is much appreciated. I realize the limitations of the lens I am using. Because of that I did not even consider processing this photo. However, on the merits of the composition and atmospheric conditions I liked what I captured and decided to see what I could pull out. I am not happy with anything about the stars other than the arrangement and how they peer through the clouds in places.
I realize the photo is technically flawed, and perhaps only us photographers would notice that. But putting that technicality aside, does composition hold interest or evoke any emotion or wonder?
I think the overall scene is gorgeous – a lovely composition, with the clouds and the mysterious light on them being a big plus.
I think desaturating blues could remove some of the attention on the stars. I’m on a quest for a fix for bad stars, and have found a wonderful one but it relies on mixed processing with PixInsight. I haven’t had a chance to test how far it can correct bad stars. If we have a brief clearing some night I’ll do some test shots. Any star field will do. I think my 24-70 wide open at 24 would provide a good test case.
I like the composition, especially how the clouds have allowed some of the stars to peak through and how the sides of the mountains push the eye to the stars. While this won’t likely be a wall hanger, I find that editing often shows the possibilities for the “next time.”
This edit by no means is offered as better, more so, it is offered to show possibilities. I gave the foreground mountains (rock faces) a little detail, added a bit brightness to the clouds and forced some darkness to the sky but added more sharpness to the stars so they would stand out against the night sky.
@Chris_Calohan ,
Thank you for the suggested edit. I will take a further look into making some more edits. I know I have detail in the land, but while standing out there my eyes did not make out any detail, so that is why I kept the land silhouetted, but a little detail as you have shown might be a good idea. I actually was a bit unhappy with the way I processed the sky darkness, so I will have to look at that again. Thanks again. I will post a repost soon.
I only had the jpg so I know there must be more detail in the raw file. Have fun. Editing generally opens doors you might think are closed.
I have added a repost above. I have taken the suggestions made and reworked the sky. I saved the file as a 16-bit TIFF and brought it into Siril. I did a Background extraction of the sky to darken it and bring out the stars. I also performed a generalized hyperbolic stretch transformation to build contrast and density in the sky. This nearly blacked out the land portion of the image. So I saved the file and brought it into PS again and composited the two images through a mask holding back the land but letting the sky in. I painted on the mask how much of the sky I would blend in with the original sky and also tried to keep some of the luminosity of the clouds in there as well to maintain the atmosphere that I liked.
I also brought in just a smidge of detail into the land portions of the image.
Have the additional edits made an improvement or moved the image to far from reality? Is the sky to stark? should I let more of the original sky bleed through a little more?
I like the new version! I could see going even darker on the sky, as @Chris_Calohan did. Wonderful drama here!
Are you processing a single image in Siril, or a burst? (I know nothing about it but it seems to be similar to PI.)
I processed just the single image. Siril is like Pixinsight but it’s open source. It’s not as powerful as Pixinsight but it has many of the same tools, most of which I have no idea yet how to use. But it does a great job with background extraction and it has many option for stretching the linear data.
It can stack, register, and blend multiple subs but I only had one image so I decided to just give it a try. I think it did a good job.
It did!
Re my post above, there was a little clearing last night and I tried the 14mm again, and also the 24-70 at 24, which I assumed would have very bad corners. (Both are older DSLR lenses used on the mirrorless R5 with an adapter.)
The 14 wasn’t worse than in earlier test shots so apparently I had poor focus on the Bodie shots. But my PixInsight method had worked a miracle on those.
The 24-70 wide open at 24 (f/2.8) wasn’t as bad as I expected, but not what I would call good. The right side was worse – not unusual for daytime lenses where a slight misalignment would never be noticed. There were some scattered thin clouds and my attempt at flats in the house were probably not the flattest illumination, but you can see the important results.
A 100 % screenshot of the LR corner before and after BlurXTerminator. I also used SCNR to remove greens. I didn’t do hot pixel removal – will add that to my procedure.
Here’s the whole frame after the corrections, exported large so you can zoom in:
@Diane_Miller the full image is with the 24-70 mm lens right? I would be over the moon if my 24 was that sharp. But PI does a great job in processing, so did BlurXTerminator. I might pull the trigger and try my luck with the Rokinon 14mm sometime before the end of the year, and also spend some time working with Siril and some of the other add-in software that works with it to deal with noise and blurs etc… Astro workflows are complicated. Thank you for all the feedback. It is very helpful.
Yes, that last one is the 24-70 at 24, wide open.
If you find another way to do the lens aberration corrections, let us all know.
A problem is that the PI stuff doesn’t deal with FGs nicely, so it’s necessary to do Starry Landscape Stacker (of the PC equivalent) and layer them together. Both can be registered to the first frame so the star positions should match.
Keep us posted with your explorations and discoveries!
Lenses are SO much better now that the days of evaluating before purchasing are about over, but with this one it would probably be worth buying it and testing (just on any star field) with the option of returning for another copy. Star quality in the corners would be an issue, and also how planar the elements are – or the attachment to the camera body.
