Starlight from the dock

Image Processing Challenge
1

Taken locally from a dock at a small lake in Florida.

Raw File

Starlight dock.dng (73.5 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.

My Edit

Starlight from the dock
Starlight from the dock1296Ă—972 1.22 MB

2

Hi Ryan, welcome to NPN! I am sure you’ll get a lot out of this community.

Your image is indeed an intriguing challenge, primarily since I don’t do star scenes…past my bedtime. :grin:

Anyway, here’s my take on this. I converted it to B&W, as I felt it would accentuate the stars. I also cropped out the dock, so it’s now more of a panorama style, again to accentuate the sky.

I created a gradient mask to work on the lake/foreground, and another one to work on the sky. For the sky, I darkened up the blacks.

From there I did a bit of dodging and burning and added a slight vignette. Finally, I cloned out the blinking satellites.

I know the sunset/sunrise colors are missing in my version…but hopefully the sky is the thing…

Starlight dock
Starlight dock2048Ă—1184 542 KB

Thanks for allowing us to play around with your image.
Cheers,
David

2 Likes
3

I can’t believe I missed this. Sorry about that Ryan. I’m not near my editing computer right now but I’ll definitely have a play with this when I get a chance - hopefully tonight… :slight_smile:

4

As promised, here is my take on this image:

First, in Lightroom:

  • First, I worked with the White Balance, Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks.
  • Next, I chose to crop the into a vertical image because to me, this scene is all about the dock (is it a dock?) and the night sky.
  • Finally I moved the image into Photoshop.

In Photoshop:

  • The first thing I did here was to try the Make it Glow action from the TK9 panel. I usually try this on my images some of the time (actually a lot lately) because it sometimes adds a nice saturation boost and added glow to an image but other times it just doesn’t look good. Here I liked the effect so I left it.
  • Next, I used a levels adjustment with a lights luminosity mask to target the bright yellow/orange part of the sky and made that part of the image a bit darker.
  • Next, using the Remove tool I filled in a few of the “holes” in the trees and got rid of a lot of the reflecting stars in the water. I’m not sure if that was the “right” thing to do but I felt that in this small web sized image they looked more like noise than stars to me.
  • Finally, I added a vignette to finish the image off.

Starlight dock-2-sharpened copy
Starlight dock-2-sharpened copy675Ă—900 361 KB

5

Black and white really does make the stars stand out. I wonder if cutting out some of the lake at the bottom may help clear up some of the lower confusion I feel looking initially at it?

6

Cool take with it vertical. Nice editing also. That is indeed a (broken down) dock.

7

Interesting that both takes so far have lost the reflection of the stars in the water, one of my favorite parts.

8

If you were to print this then I would definitely leave the reflected stars in. My thinking was that in a small version of the image for the web the stars might get mistaken for sensor noise.

9

FWIW, I think the crop simplifies the scene. Yes, we’re losing the reflections…but sometimes a scene can be too busy. Of course that is my take…this is your image and your vision.

Cheers,
David