 Hey, this is Nico Carver. Today I'm going to show you how to take this basic stacked image of the Milky Way and turn it into this using just basic stuff in Adobe Photoshop. I'd encourage you to edit along with me to get my free Milky Way data that I'm going to be using in this video. Just visit the link below in the description and sign up for my email newsletter. Don't worry it's not spammy, I'll send it most like four emails a year and you're welcome to unsubscribe whenever you like. Once you sign up for the newsletter, within a few minutes get an email from me with the download links for the Milky Way data. Go ahead and download all three TIFF files. So you'll have the starlist.tiff, the stars.tiff, and the single.tiff. I prepared these ahead of time all from the same data set so that we can skip the boring time intensive stuff. But if you are new to astrophotography, I'll put a card in the upper right part of the screen right now to my Andromeda start to finish video which will take you through the whole process. Alright, let's go. So with those files downloaded, go ahead and just open them up. I'm going to hold down shift and click to open up all three here into Photoshop. And so we have our star's picture, our starlist picture which is just our star's picture run through starnet plus plus and our single picture which we're going to use the foreground from. So let's start with the starlist picture. I'm going to start by just adding a gentle S-curve using the curves adjustment layer. So up here I'm just going to click on curves adjustment layer and I'm just going to pick a point on this side of the histogram and bring it up a little bit and pick a point on this side of the histogram and move it down a little bit just to add in this very slight S-curve which as you can see added contrast to the picture. If I turn it off and on, you can see the picture is a lot more punchy now. Meaning the dark parts of the picture got darker and the mid tones were raised up a little bit. Alright, next I'm going to just grab my lasso tool here because I want to select all of the nebulae in the picture and give them a little bit of a saturation boost compared to everything else. So I'm going to start up here with this huge sharpness object. I can't remember the name right now. Here's the blue horse head. Here's Ro Ophiuki. And you might think, what is Niko doing? Why is he just doing these very crappy, not very precise selections? Well, you're going to see here in a second why it doesn't matter how precise I am with this. So it's just going to give us a little bit of an impression of a little bit added saturation. Alright, and the eagle. There we go. OK, so I've circled all of the nebulae just with the lasso tool. You could use a different tool if you want. When we have made a selection on the image and then we add an adjustment layer, it automatically uses that selection to make a mask. Just to show you how that works, if I click on hue saturation, you can see right here in the little thumbnail, there's the mask. If I alt-click it, it does two things. One, it brings the mask up here so I can see what it looks like. And two, it shows the mask properties right here. And I want this window up because what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the feather slider and drag that way over so that all of these sort of loose selections that I made are now really feathered out. So there's a nice gradient, no hard edges. Then I can click on this little icon right here because we haven't actually done anything yet, or double-click it, sorry. And then it opens up the properties for the saturation. And I'm just going to go ahead and grab that saturation slider and bring it over to about 30, 35. This is going to be pretty subtle, especially in the video recording. But if you are following along, what you can do is turn that layer off and on. And you should see all the nebulae that we made those feathered selections on get a little bit of a boost of saturation, which is what we're going for. All right, with that done, I'm now looking at this again, and I think I just want to bring down the black point even a little bit more. So I'm just going to do that. OK, with that done, let's go ahead and add in the stars. I'm just going to click on the tab here for the stars layer. I'm going to select all, Command A or Control A, and copy Command C, Control C on Windows, and Paste. And because this is the exact same image, one was just starless, one was with stars. It's all lined up already. We don't have to do anything there. I'm going to go ahead and change the blend mode over here in the Layers panel from Normal to Screen. And what Screen does technically is it inverts this layer and everything below it to inversions and multiplies them together and then inverts it back. That is not really important, but what's important is that what it does is it brings the mid-tones way up and also blends whatever you've put on top here with everything else. So here's just the starless, and then here's when we add the stars. One thing it does, though, is that the overall picture is a lot brighter now. So we're going to go ahead and add a curve again. So we're going to go up here to the Curves adjustment layer. This time, instead of drawing an S-curve to begin with, I'm going to first just grab this black point and drag that over. And then I'll add an S-curve. There we go. OK, that looks pretty good. The one thing that I noticed about it, though, is that it's overall just a little bit yellow-greenish. So I want to just cool it up a little bit, maybe add a bit more blue to the Color Balance. So you could do that with the Color Balance tool, but I'm just going to use Curves again. But this time, I'm going to go into the Color Channels. So I'm going to choose the blue curve and add a bit of an S to that, meaning just take a point here on this side of the histogram, bring it up a little bit, take a point on this side of the histogram, and bring it down a little bit. Maybe I'll go even a little bit more. I'm going to do the same thing with red, but even subtler. OK. So this looks pretty natural. I like how it's looking. Let's go ahead and add in the foreground. So to do that, I'm going to go jump over here to the single.tif. I'm going to grab my quick selection tool, which is four tools down. I'm going to draw on the foreground. Just click and drag on the foreground here. It should try to find edges, but it doesn't do the greatest of jobs. If we zoom in, you can see it's just doing a very basic job on finding the edges. You can also see a single exposure is pretty noisy. We'll deal with that a little bit later. But first, we have to clean up this edge here. So to do that, I'm going to go up here to the quick selections options and click on this one on the far right that says select and mask. If you don't see a red overlay, if instead it looks like that, just click on the view and choose overlay. And then over here, there's a bunch of different little options. Click on refine edge brush tool, the second one down. And just paint in around the edge of the trees here. I'm really just clicking and dragging the paint just to get rid of this bright stuff along the tree line edge. Even though we're probably actually going to bring this back in, I just find you want to start with a fairly clean edge, and then you can gradient it back in later. But that looks good. So I'm going to hit OK. It makes the selection. And then we can go ahead and click on the add later mask button, which is this third little button over from the left in the layers panel. And we're going to go ahead and copy this whole layer. So just do edit copy. Move over here to my starless.tiff, which is no longer starless. And we'll do edit paste. OK. And it drops that in right there. We can, of course, move it down like that. But I want a little bit more room down here at the bottom for the foreground, because I like a little bit more foreground than this. And so let's go ahead and we could use image canvas size to do this. But I know I'm going to want to crop to 4 by 5 at some point. Anyway, so let's go ahead and just do it now. And I'm going to expand the crop box down below where we're at now, like so. And we'll just take off a tiny bit of that top edge there. OK, that looks good. Oh, and one thing to note is you can see we have a little bit of room down here, too, still. So we could still move this foreground around a little bit if we need to. So I could grab my move tool again and see I can get a little bit more of the sky this way. And now you might be wondering, well, you're not being super precise about where the Milky Way is compared to where the foreground was in your picture. The thing is, the Milky Way was moving across the sky in this foreground throughout the night. So basically, any orientation here with the trees will be accurate at one point in the night. I'm not too worried about that. OK, so I'm going to do something like that. OK, and then to add in a little bit of more of a blend, what I usually do is you can see this is sort of like a hard blend right now. What I usually do is I just take a really soft brush, want 0% hardness and maybe 15% opacity. And I'm just going to add in a little bit of the foreground along the edge here just to show you what that looks like, something like that. And this just, I don't know, this just always just to me sells it a little bit more that it could be a single image, even though we are mixing a tracked sky with a foreground. The more that I'm looking at this, the more that I think the whole composition should move down a little bit more, though, because I don't need all this stuff up here. And I want a little bit more, just a tiny bit more foreground. So I'm just going to bring up that crop box again and just move the whole thing down like this. Just basically get as much foreground as we can. There we go. Accept. OK, this is looking good. The next thing that I want to do here is because I've now blended in a foreground with everything below, I want a new layer from visible. This is a weird keyboard shortcut. On Mac, it's Command-Option-Shift-E. And on Windows, it's Control-Alt-Shift-E. But all that did is it just, you can see nothing changed here in the canvas. It's just over here. We now have a new Layer 3. And I'll just call this Combined, because we've now combined the three images that we started with, Starless, Stars, and Single. We've done enough work at this point. So let's go ahead and save this off. I'll call it just Milky Way 14 millimeter. And I want to save it as a Photoshop document. All right. OK, at this point, there are cosmetic issues that we have to fix. And then there's the stylistic choices. So this is basically like a base edit of just getting the three images together. And then from here, it's a lot of just like your creativity that would finish a Milky Way edit. OK, let's start with the cosmetic adjustments. I noticed that over here and in this corner, especially, it just looks like a little bit too bright. Remember, I didn't take any calibration frames here. So that might have been fixed with something like Flats. Who knows? I'm going to go ahead and just grab a Curve Layer. And I'm just going to draw. First, I'm going to fill this mask with black. So I'll just do Edit, Fill with black. And black means that most of this Curve Layer, I don't want to affect the picture. I really just want it to affect this corner. So I'm going to raise my opacity back up to 100, but leave the brush nice and soft. And I'm just going to paint in that corner and then bring down the curves on that a little bit until it sits with the rest of the picture a bit better. And I think I overdid it just a little bit in terms of painting that in right there. OK, OK, so here's before. You can see the edges just look a little bit too bright. And then there's after. Now, big stylistic choice is how much contrast and color changes we want to make to this. This to me right now is a very sort of low contrast, very naturalistic color-looking Milky Way. And so you might like it just like this. But if we want it to be a little bit punchier, let's go ahead and grab the curves. And I'm going to take the green curve and bring it down. And again, I just want you to try this on your own monitor because just bringing the green curve down, we just did a tiny little bit, makes a huge difference here to the image. We can also just on the normal RGB curve add in a little bit more contrast at this point. This is making it, again, what I call punchier. So there's before, there's after. And these are stylistic sort of decisions. You don't have to do this. Let's go ahead and stamp a new visible again. So I'm just going to do Command Option Shift E on Mac or Control Option Shift E on Windows. And here's another thing you can do, maybe a little bit controversial, dodging and burning. So many great photographers dodged and burned their prints. You can do it right here in Photoshop. It's a selective permanent kind of adjustment that you're making. And so basically dodging is brightening parts of the picture. Burning is darkening parts of the picture. And in Photoshop here, you can choose what range you want it to dodge or burn. And so I'm going to burn the shadows a little bit and just bring the exposure up. The more you raise this exposure up, the more dramatic the burn is. So I'm going to say, let's do 20%, just affecting the shadows, OK? And then if I just sort of, OK, that's a little bit too much, I think. Let's bring that down just a little bit. I'm going to do 16%. There we go. And then if I just sort of bring it out here and I'm just going to do a little bit of clicking on some of the major dark nebulae in the Milky Way to make them stand out a little bit more. I like to do this pretty subtly. I don't know how well you can see that in the video. But don't overdo it. Don't set the exposure to 50% or something. It's quite easy to overdo and make the Milky Way look really fake. But I think that when you do it correctly, the dark nebulae have this feeling like they are in front, which they literally are. Whenever you see a dark nebulae, it's covering something up, meaning it's closer to us. And so by darkening them just a little bit, it helps add a little separation and give that sort of 3D effect to the picture. OK, from here, we can continue making it a little bit more fantasy, a little bit more crazy if we want. And the main way that I would do that is, again, just continuing to mess with the colors, basically. And so if I take down the green a little bit and add a little bit of blue saturation in the highlights and then bring back the red a little bit, here we go. That's before. That's after. And it just adds a little bit more color variety. And I'm not sure exactly. Yeah, it is adding more color variety. It's taking the picture away from natural Milky Way colors into much more of a fantasy. So this is where it's really up to you. So this is where I'm pretty much agnostic. I've shed a lot of Milky Way at this point, but I don't have a strong side in terms of this is more natural color. This, what I just did, where I put in more blue into the highlights and took out a little bit more green, is definitely not natural color. But I think it looks better, maybe. It just really pops by adding more blue to the highlights. And so I like it. I'm going to leave it like that. Really, we're almost done here. The last thing I want to do is just address the foreground. And so I'm going to stamp yet another visible, stamp from visible, which is Command Option Shift E on Mac or Control Option Shift E on Windows. And the main thing that I want to do here with the foreground is do some noise reduction, because I'm sure it is quite noisy. So I'm going to do that with Filter, Camera Raw Filter. And I'm going to open up the Detail one here. And I'm just going to drag the Color Noise Reduction and the Noise Reduction way over. And we can zoom in and turn that off and on to see what it's doing. Good. I'm also actually going to bring up the vibrance and the exposure of the foreground a little bit and maybe make it just a tad bluer. And I'm only looking at the foreground when I'm doing this because I'm going to draw a gradient that is going to basically only apply this to the foreground. Now, you might like what it did to the whole picture. It's sort of cool. I don't know. I think it's going a little bit too far for my taste. But let's go ahead and apply that. So since what we just did in Adobe Camera Raw, I mostly just want to apply to the foreground. I'm going to add a Layer Mask and, again, draw a gradient on that Layer Mask. Like so. Maybe I can have it extend a little bit into the Milky Way. I did actually sort of like what it did with the vibrance there to the whole picture. So I'm going to go ahead and just add a Vibrance Adjustment Layer and just bring that up a bit. And at this point, I just think that the foreground and the Milky Way just look a little bit too separated still. And I think it's a color balance issue. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just open up a Color Balance Adjustment Layer. I'm going to Alt-Drag this same gradient that I used here onto this mask. And then I'm just going to play around with the color balance of the foreground until it matches and blends a little bit better with what we have going on in the sky, which has a little bit of a purple feel to it. So basically, I just took the foreground and made it a little bit more sort of purple like it's motivated from the light of our fantasy Milky Way here. OK, at this point, I think I'm done. But I always just hit the F key a couple times just so I can sort of see it without any distractions. And I like to zoom in and look around a little bit. I mean, it has still a fair amount of noise everywhere when you zoom all the way in. But for Instagram and that kind of thing, it'll still be quite impressive. I would have had to just maybe stack the foreground and take even more exposures in the night sky or done tracked exposures to bring the noise down any more than I have. But this looks good. I'm happy with the overall presentation of it. I also like to just maybe get up, have a coffee, and then come back and sit back down and look at it and think, is this overboard? Do I think it's a little bit too much? Because one nice thing about working how we did in Photoshop is you can always go back in here and play around with, OK, maybe that was like a little bit too much vibrance. So I can just turn that down just a little bit, maybe meet it halfway, that kind of thing. But when you are happy with it, what I always do, let's say you want to save this for social media, like sharing it on Instagram, I go to File, Export, Save for Web, Legacy. And basically, any option in here is going to be good, because just I always leave on this Convert to sRGB. And let's do Fit in View to see how it looks. Because this color representation when it converts to sRGB should stay consistent on any device. So the other thing that I like is right down here, it tells me the file size, so 17 megabytes. I can still email it to myself to get it on my phone. And if you want to, you can resize here. So if I wanted a smaller version for sharing on the web, I could resize it right here. I usually use the bilinear for resizing astrophotography. So for instance, I could do 2,000 by 2,500. And so I can keep the full size for myself, but for sharing, I'm going to make it a little bit smaller. All right, that all looks good. I'll click Save. And there's our final picture. It's not perfect, but this was a quick edit that shows you, again, what we did was combine a starless image, an image, the same image, but with the stars and the foreground all together in Photoshop, and then just played around with color and curves and saturation, a little bit of noise reduction to get to this final image, which I think is pretty impressive. And especially considering this isn't from the darkest site out west or anything. This is just a portal foresight here on the east coast of the US. And the foreground isn't anything special, but I think that it does add to the presentation when you can put in foreground, even when it's something sort of very basic like this, because it really gives you an impression of the size of the Milky Way compared to the tree line here. Well, I hope you enjoyed this edit along. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com. Clear skies.