I saw the most amazing northern lights a week ago. I downloaded the photos today after going on a tour with a photographer. He advised a different method from advice I had seen on the net but, having seen his work, decided to go with it as I have zero experience of such things. I would appreciate some advice on a good resource to read or watch or, if somebody has the time, their own routine. I have watched a few and am confused. Would I need luminosity masks, for example? Thanks, hopefully!
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Processing the northern lights.
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Craig_85
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I processed mine how I wanted them to look and at the time was relatively pleased.
I then printed them and they were wildly out of gamut and looked terrible!
So, I have just re processed them for print and it comes out as quite a different image. Which, to be fair is probably more accurate to what they looked like and I now have a print that matches my screen image.
For me if you want to print the images, right from the raw conversion stage you need to be soft proofing on a calibrated monitor with the colour profile your printer will use, then right through PS use the gamut warning to avoid that issue.
For both edits I did use luminosity masks, but I was blending different exposure foregrounds in with the sky/lights shots.
What RAW data have you captured to begin with? I.e. were you working with multiple exposures from a tripod or do you only have single files? How much of a feature is your foreground or were you mainly shooting the lights against the sky? Luminosity masks can still be used to make selections for various selective editing but the necessity of them more depends on your answers to those questions.
I then printed them and they were wildly out of gamut and looked terrible!
So, I have just re processed them for print and it comes out as quite a different image. Which, to be fair is probably more accurate to what they looked like and I now have a print that matches my screen image.
For me if you want to print the images, right from the raw conversion stage you need to be soft proofing on a calibrated monitor with the colour profile your printer will use, then right through PS use the gamut warning to avoid that issue.
For both edits I did use luminosity masks, but I was blending different exposure foregrounds in with the sky/lights shots.
What RAW data have you captured to begin with? I.e. were you working with multiple exposures from a tripod or do you only have single files? How much of a feature is your foreground or were you mainly shooting the lights against the sky? Luminosity masks can still be used to make selections for various selective editing but the necessity of them more depends on your answers to those questions.
Hi Craig
Single exposures, usually some foreground of hills - no snow at this time of year where we were, a few with late sunset colours at the horizon, a few just of the sky with coronas (?). We were very lucky to see so much. I hope my photos will do it justice. I watched you tube thing today showing the use of channels and creating your own channels and blending them. When I did exactly the same thing ( according to what he said) I couldn't get past the first step of creating another channel from the green... sigh.
Thanks for replying.
Single exposures, usually some foreground of hills - no snow at this time of year where we were, a few with late sunset colours at the horizon, a few just of the sky with coronas (?). We were very lucky to see so much. I hope my photos will do it justice. I watched you tube thing today showing the use of channels and creating your own channels and blending them. When I did exactly the same thing ( according to what he said) I couldn't get past the first step of creating another channel from the green... sigh.
Thanks for replying.
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Craig_85
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Link the video then I am happy to try and break down what they are trying to explain if you like.
Colour selections are quite simple. I prefer doing them in channels by cmd+click on an individual colour channel to select the highlights of that colour (or inverting it for the shadows), then creating a new alpha channel from that mask and then using curves to refine it further. The purpose of this is to create a mask to use that allows you to selectively edit the image.
However, if that is confusing PS has another way of doing the same thing. Under the 'Select' menu go to 'Colour Range' and use the eye dropper to click on say a bright green, then adjust fuzziness to reveal more green/mask out other colours. Remember white is reveal, and black is conceal. You can also use the additive colour dropper and further tweak the fuzziness to refine your selection. When you close the colour range box your selection will be pre loaded as a marching ants selection. Then you can just open a saturation adjustment layer for example and that will be masked on there for you.
This is all well and good, but if you are using local selections you need to decide why. Ask yourself, do I want to increase saturation of this selected area? Or perhaps the opposite, you want to increase saturation of the other tones but protect those bright greens. In which case you would invert the layer mask...
Hi thanks for this detail. I will try the colour range method as I am familiar with that technique. When I get back home later today, I will look for the video again; I am fairly sure that I noted down his name so that I could have another go. Thanks for this. In spite of some short exposures, there still seems to be star movement so I am also rather puzzled by that!