Light Painting Magic - Complete from start to finish including editing.

Hello everybody, welcome back to the channel. And you know if you follow my work here on Nightscape Images, you'll know I get very excited about shooting astro-landscape photography. And the thing that really gets my heart pumping is when I can find a subject out here on a farm property and I can do some light painting on it. Now that is really my favorite type of subject and it just so happens that I have an exact subject here that I want to show you guys. So let's get over there and I'll show you what I'm talking about. Now behind me you can see an old gig. This is affectionately known as Bessie. It's been in the family here at Rostrada Country House for decades. Not quite a century I don't think, but not far off it. Anyway, it's been moved into this shed just recently. So it's a little bit more accessible and close up to this area here where I can shoot. And what I want to do is show you how I'm going to shoot this gig just outside the shed here. Include some of this old shed in the shot and the Milky Way galactic core in the sky overhead. And look I have shot this quite a few times before but never in this particular spot. So I've dragged it out into the paddock on the western side when the Milky Way has been in that side of the sky and I've dragged it out into the eastern side of the paddock over here when the Milky Way has been rising up in the east. Well at the moment the Milky Way is rising up in the east. So that's the direction I'm facing. There's a nice open sky down there. So let's get it out and I'll show you what I'm talking about. So I'm currently doing my best interpretation of a horse. Trying to get this thing out and not breaking anything in the meantime. So I'm gonna, oh dear oh dear, bring it out put it about here somewhere. About there. That should be fine because I'm going to put the camera over here facing down that way. And the big thing that I want to include is the shed in the background. Now this shed has just recently been somewhat renovated. It looks old and that's what I like about it because they put the same old iron back on the roof but the roof blew off here one day in a storm and it's taken quite a while to get it back on. So the whole rustic view is what I'm looking for here. So having all these bits and pieces laying around in the background is perfect for what I'm trying to do here today. Now we've also got these couple of old bag trolleys and I'm going to strategically place them up against these posts here. Just sort of randomly leaning against the post. There's another one back there because, well have a look at it. Look at that. It's just, it's homemade basically and it's pretty old but that one's even older. Love the look of this stuff. It is fantastic and I just love having old junk like this laying around because the older and the junkier it is, the better it comes across in the photo. So it doesn't matter if it's all random. That is the key, the glue if you like, that holds this whole shot together. So where the camera is down there now is roughly the position of where I'm going to have my camera facing down that way. Now the key to this shot is to get the camera nice and low about here facing straight across there. The Milky Way galactic core is right there tonight. Probably about 10, 10 30 something like that. Now what I'm planning to do is shoot this foreground, do my fine art light painting technique on all those little intricate details and I'm going to do a tracked sky and what I'll do there is I'll just take my camera the other side of this fence, shoot the sky, nice unobstructed view out there. It'll just probably just be a single exposure, one tracked sky shot and who knows how many shots I'll be taking here because there's a lot of little detail there. So could be 10, 15, could be more, who knows but I'm looking forward to it. Oh gee I'm excited. So anyway I think everything's in readiness so the next time you see me will be out here tonight under the stars. Okay so I've made my way back out here tonight to have a look at this subject and lo and behold I've come out and it's cloudy. So looking at the forecast it's supposed to clear up a little bit later so I'm still hopeful that everything will work out fine but as it stands at the moment I'm just going to look at the foreground here, work out my exact composition and just go from there. Okay so you can see here I've got my camera it's about 400 millimeters up off the ground so pretty low and as you would know from a lot of my videos I often have my camera low down and the reason for that is because I want my subject to be standing out above the horizon as much as I possibly can. I've got the shed and everything behind the cart here and that's quite high so I've got to make sure I get down and the sky, there's plenty of sky there for it to show and having the camera down low the other thing it does is gives much more power to the foreground subject. Now I fully realize also by getting my camera with a wide angle lens this is a 20 millimeter lens I'm using that I'm adding distortion to the edges of the frame so the shed there being nice and straight won't necessarily look straight because it's right on the edge of my frame but I'm willing to compromise on that because I think the other aspect is just that little bit more important I want this thing to stand out I want the foreground subject here that's closest to the camera to be the boldest and most aggressive if you like subject in the frame and of course the Milky Way is going to be bold and aggressive as well because it always is and that's massive that's big and that's bright and what I'm going to do there is shoot that on the tracker so I will use my hydrogen alpha modified Nikon Z6 for that shot so that's all good I'm planning to just shoot that the other side of this fence just there on the track over there so I don't have anything obscuring the view so what I'll do now I'm going to start shooting anyway in in faith because so far the clouds are still there's a few stars popping out so I'll do that and possibly do my light painting and see how we go with that okay so I've got my camera set up I'm going to do the light painting I'm shooting at ISO 500 f 5.6 10 second shutter speeds and that's for all of the images I'm going to be lighting on this little cart here I'm going to revolve myself around starting over that side moving around the front doing the gig first and then I'll move around into the shed and that way I have a bit of a pattern going so I can sort of work out what I have and haven't done then I'll look on the screen of the camera make sure that the exposures are good and if I have to redo something I'll do it then so it's just a quicker workflow but maybe more but you know sometimes you've just got to go over what you think you might need and then you know you don't have to use every single exposure so I'm pretty happy with that so I'm just going to wait now there's a bit of clear sky coming across so I'm going to wait and then I'll come back I might go and have a cup of tea I think leave my gear here come back bring the tracker out wait for that sky to clear and after that what I'll be doing is wrapping up but I think I might just run you through a little bit of the post-processing of this image as well I won't go through every dynamic because that'll take too long I'll just show you some of the bits and pieces how I put it together and at the end of that well we'll have a little bit of a look at the final image so after having my cuppa I came out and the sky was clearing beautifully so I set up my tracker now I was using the sky watcher star adventurer mini and I'm using my compass alignment method using sky safari to polar align here in the southern hemisphere my plan was to just shoot single exposures I shot a few compositions just to make sure that I was lining up the galactic core in the exact position that it is from the camera angle I had with the gig and the shed and it lined up absolutely beautiful it was getting very cold by this stage and I rugged up and feeling the cold but really enjoying the majestic view of the rising milky way galactic core in the background now the first thing I did was begin to work on my tracked sky image you can see it here this is the raw file all I've done is added plus 20 to the exposure minus five to highlights that's it you can see the settings f 2.8 this is 130 seconds at 20 millimeters at iso 800 so I'm going to send this item off to photoshop and we're going to go from there and see what we come up with so once I get to photoshop I'm going to use my star exterminator program to take out the stars and edit the stars and the nebulosity separately you can see that is under the file menu here in photoshop I've done a duplicate of the layer so I've got a starless layer and I'm going to have a stars only layer now my next step is to go into camera raw and do a little bit of work on that stylus layer so I go to the basics tab setting here increase the dehaze you can see how that really starts to punch out the image but that does change the color somewhat so I'm adjusting these sliders a little bit just to change the tone remember this is an astro modified camera so it does have a little bit tinge more of magenta and I've increased the exposure contrast a little bit more white just to punch that image out a fair bit and you can see here the difference that makes so when I press ok you can see the before and then you can see the after and it looks very very stunning and now you can see I just enable the stars layer which I produced earlier and you can see now the stars are over the top of that edited nebulosity so the stars are not blown out and in fact they look more minimized because it's sort of because I've used the blend mode on those stars they're not so full on and I think this is a good way of editing the image and so you can clearly see the difference between the before and after shot here same image really minimal editing done to this image in photoshop but by producing that starless layer it makes a huge amount of difference to the final product so from here I just bring it back into lightroom you can see it there full screen it is quite an impressive image and that's what I'm going to be using for my sky and I will export that out into a folder as a tiff file I've called it their 20 millimeter tracked sky rising two minute shutter speed just just for my reference so I know what it is and I click on export and away we go now we're getting on to the editing of the foreground you can see here that the sky was quite cloudy when I began so I shot some images of the sky here but there's no stars there so I then I moved on to the actual foreground and you can see quite a number of layers here where the foreground is light painted and there's many many many of them I think I did more way more than I need but you know as I've said before I think it's much better to have more than not enough in situations like this so I've probably gone over the same thing a number of times and towards the end of the night the stars came back and you can see here the last image I took is quite clear there's a bit of cloud but not much and this is where my Milky Way Galactic Core was at the beginning of my shoot but it took me quite a while to get this done and by the time the sky cleared I left my camera sitting there by the time the sky cleared the Milky Way is now up here out of frame but it was right down in this area here and so anyway what I'm going to do now is select all of the images that I have worked on now there's quite a number of them I'm going to send them all over to Photoshop so to do that I'm just going to hold down shift on that last one now I don't want these three so I'm just going to hold ctrl and click on those and they are gone and now you can see I've got 34 images selected so I'm going to right click on any one of those edit in open as layers in Photoshop and this will now open Photoshop with all of those layers separately and we'll come back and see what that looks like so you can see here the 34 layers plus one background original layer has come into Photoshop I've changed the blend mode on all of those foreground layers to lighten rather than normal and there you get a bit of an idea of what this image is going to look like what I've got to do now is put layer masks on all of these and rub out these bits that I don't want in each image now the first thing I have to do is rub out the sky in every layer I'm doing this using a hard brush to make it nice and quick as you can see I'm not selecting the sky in any other mate I'm just rubbing it out pretty roughly as you can see there and I just go in a little bit closer you can see and what I'm going to do here is basically copy this layer onto all of the other layers so that the sky is rubbed out exactly the same on each of them and as you can see I'm being pretty rough not very pedantic about this but that's the way I do it and it doesn't have to be more accurate than this to be absolutely honest with you so that looks good now of course I do have to make sure I rub out the light painted bit so I'll do that actually I'm going to change my brush to a soft brush for this I've used a hard brush for the sky and that just makes it a little bit more there we go with the foreground I like to use a soft brush and that's good so what I'm going to do there is copy that layer mask to the next layer down here so let's have a look at that hold down alt copy it down and away we go now for this next layer I don't really want that bit to be rubbed out so I'm just going to rub it back in you'll I'll explain why as we go through but there's parts of this image will be transparent and other parts that won't be and I want to make sure each layer is pretty much independent except for the sky which I had to rub out otherwise I'd see stars showing through and I don't want stars to show through on any of these foreground layers and so as we continue the editing I'm just going to copy the layer mask down to each layer as we go down and that's going to copy that rubbed out sky which is exactly what I want to do on every single layer I'm doing them one at a time just to be sure that everything works out the way it should and it's looking pretty good to me at this point in time oh now one thing I didn't mention but I will now is that I lowered the opacity on that bottom layer just so I could see what I was doing to 48% there you can see it now if I push that up to 100% the sky shows through a lot more that's just a a way that I help myself be able to find things that I've rubbed out it's just a little thing that I've done over the years and it seems to work pretty well okay so I'll do all of these and then we'll come back and we'll go through and get rid of all the light streaks all right so here we are I've done the layer mask on each layer now I'm just going to turn off every layer except the top one and the bottom one and what I want to do there is basically go through each layer mask and rub out anything that needs rubbing out for example the torch light so so far I'm three layers down and I haven't had a torch I've been outside the frame here we go you can see one there so I'm just going to go in grab make sure it's black over here grab my soft paintbrush and just gently rub that out have to be careful because it's easy to get yourself in the shot there for example uh legs boots things like that so sometimes you just have to zoom in and have a good look and make sure that it's not there okay so this looks pretty good let's just go to the next one so some of these as you can see don't require anything and I've done that deliberately in the field because I know that it is so easy to get yourself in the frame and create unnecessary work for yourself so here we go now here I can see behind that cart there is quite a bit of light there but you'll notice now I'm rubbing straight over that carpet nothing's happening why is that because the light itself is not coming from the front it's lighting up this fence here and this is the thing with light painting you really have to be aware all the time of what you're rubbing out and what it's impacting on each of the layers and you can see here the actual light I want to rub out is down there somewhere but it's lighting up this area here so if I rubbed out here I'd be in trouble but under here no problem and as I said some of these are going to be unnecessary but it's starting to take shape you can see the image building with all of these layers that I've produced and that's where the torch is down there there's another one there so I'll just go through all of these and then we'll come back out at the end and we'll have a look at the final image and see where we go from there so as you can see I've gone through and done some edits to this image now if you look down here this is a technique that I use a lot I will actually put a cross on the layer mask of the layers I don't intend to use because at a glance I can see which ones I'm not using I don't want to delete them just in case but there's quite a few there so there's one two three four five six seven seven layers out of those 34 that I didn't even bother to use and that's okay because as I mentioned before I've over recorded those in the field done the same thing more than once and to put that cross on there by the way you right click on the layer mask and it says either enable delete or apply so at the moment I'll put enable and you can see it's gone but if I click there I can say disable right click layer mask it puts a red cross and that just gives me a visual cue now the other thing I'm going to do here because in a moment I'm going to do a sky replacement here but before I do that I'll just show you what the image looks like as you turn the layers on and off you can see what happens here different bits and pieces of the layers disappear and you can see how the image is built up by enabling or disabling the layers and it's quite dramatic it's beautiful really and you can follow these in many of my other editing videos to see how this looks now I'm not quite finished with this yet but the thing I'm going to do is select all of the foreground layers hold down shift on the keyboard and drag all of those down to this group layer and that's made a group so it just changes things now you'll notice the blend mode of the group is a pass through don't know why it does that but it does so I want to make that light and remember that's how we had that before now the reason I put that into a group is so that I can disable that very quickly like that all together but all of the layers are still there if I click on that down now you can see them all still where I had them originally so I haven't deleted anything as of yet so my next step is to put in a my tracked sky over the top of this okay so here is the sky replacement that's the sky that I shot earlier so I've gone up here to edit go down to sky replacement entered the sky that I wanted by clicking this little arrow takes you to a folder where your sky is located that is how it's come straight in I have done no editing at all it isn't that absolutely gorgeous it fits beautifully now you can zoom in and have a look at see what that looks like close up and it looks fantastic it is possible to mask out a few things here which I will do just to be sure and you can see here I'm just masking this the back oops I just went too far so you can see I'm masking out the back of the backboard here and you can see that that's just to make it a bit darker I don't think it's a problem as is to be absolutely honest with you but I'm just showing you what can be done this is the tools inside the sky replacement menu there and I do this most of the time especially with objects like this that are quite hard edged it's really quite a simple process really and I'm just using a overlay blend mode which is standard on the brush tool in the sky replacement this is very similar to what you would see in other parts of photoshop I'll just go along the top edge of this spouting on the shed here but this is quite an easy one because it's got nice straight hard edges not too worried about these spokes they look pretty good to me and I won't bore you with all the intricate details because I've got other videos that go through this in a much greater detail than this one but I just wanted to show you some of the little things that you can do to get this to look pretty good and I am quite happy with how this is looking so the sky replacement in photoshop is for me a game changer when it comes to tracked skies because it just makes it so much easier to put those track skies in over the top and remember I've still got my light painted layers here to fill out the foreground and so that does make things a lot easier you can see here the stars are showing through just just a little bit so I just go in and rub them out so that they don't show through and this doesn't take very long at all it's not tedious it's quite simple and so there we have it now as I've mentioned to you many times in the past the foreground is reliant a light painted foreground is reliant on having a dark silhouetted background to blend over so you can see here this the dark silhouetted foreground that I've already got which is on the bottom original layers they've all got black background that's how the lighten blend mode works if they weren't on a black background you would not get the same effect so that's very critical I want you to remember that you need a black silhouette for the light painted layers to show out using the lighten blend mode okay so at this point you can see the whole image with the foreground there there's the foreground all the layers blended so what we do now is we look at the whole image with that sky with the foreground and look to see if there's anything we don't like now you can spend hours doing this if you so wish and that's fine there's probably a couple of little things I'm going to do to this image but most of what I've done here I'm happy with maybe a couple of little things like a vignette in Lightroom when I get back there but overall this looks fantastic as you can see I've still got all of those layers available here so I can still do the edits but when I'm finished doing the edits I'm going to flatten this image because this is a very large file size and I don't need a large file size on my computer so what I'm going to do is just search for a couple of little things that I might want to change but apart from that I'm going back to Lightroom to do some final edits okay so here we are in Lightroom all I did here was just add a mask just a linear gradient down here to give it a bit more of that vignetting look so I rubbed it out on the sky and that looks pretty good so if you have a look at this image now let's just zoom in and have a look at some of the details on the image and you can see there there's some just beautiful detail in the small sections and that's what this method is all about it's about getting detail in small parts of the image and I'm very very happy with this image I think it looks fantastic but as you can see it took a fair amount of work to get that and well you know this is what we do I mean it's all about getting an image that tells a story and I think this does that beautifully and you can see the image there full screen absolutely love this one well there you go that's my interpretation of the scene here with a little gig here outside the shed on the farm and I hope you enjoyed that now pretty soon I'm going to be heading off on a bit of a road trip so you mightn't hear from me for a little while because I'll be away shooting more footage and compositions and all sorts of things doing a road trip I love road trips so we'll just see what comes of that but in the meantime I hope you guys have an absolutely fantastic week I look forward to seeing you in the next video comment down below subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so yet because I love astro landscape photography and that's what I do here on the channel so I'll see you guys in the next video see you later