Complete Workflow For Processing Night Photos by Michael Breitung

Tutorial Content

The complete tutorial is close to two hours in length. For a better viewing experience I have split it into 11 sections. This way it’s easy to revisit interesting parts of the workflow and to incorporate a selection of the techniques into the processing of your nighttime photos.

After a short introduction video, which you can watch below, I talk about how I planned, scouted and took the photo, which in the end consisted of 40 photos for the night sky and another four photos for the foreground.

Then I show the pre-processing in Lightroom, followed by some image averaging in Sequator, as well as sky enhancements in Photoshop.

I then continue in Photoshop with focus stacking before I show how I blended the photo. The blending is the most crucial part of the processing here and I had to develop some new techniques to achieve the result I was after.

After some finishing touches I show you my multi-pass sharpening, which I use to enhance the details in the photo.

Finally I prepare the photo for web and print. In those last two sections I give tips on how to ensure the photo looks good on Instagram and I also explain how I created different versions of the photo for proofing.

Prerequisites

This video tutorial is for the advanced Photoshop user. I assume that you are familiar with layers, masks, filters and adjustment layers. If not, I recommend watching my free tutorials first. On this site you will also find links to the plugins I use. If you have watched my other tutorials this is perfect and will make it easier to follow along, but it’s not mandatory.

I use Adobe Lightroom 6 and Photoshop CS6 in the tutorial. Photoshop CS5 or later is generally sufficient to apply the techniques I use here. I also use some filters of the Nik Collection, which is available for free using the provided link.

I already mentioned Sequator, which is also free. I use it for the image averaging.

I also use a set of actions called Astronomy Tools. Those are great for processing nighttime images, but they are not mandatory. I use them to further reduce the noise in the sky and to tweak some stars.