A bit of filtration on the night sky
Both images shot ISO 800 f/2.5 60 seconds tracked on a nomad tracker with my astro mod Canon RP.
I have wanted to try a one of the various star enhancement filters for a while, but have struggled to find one with the convenience I have wanted. Recently I moved to the Kase magnetic filters for my daylight photography (yes I do still take photos in the daylight….sometimes) and this was my chance to try one of their filters that I though might fit the bill, the Black Must 1/2 filter.
Above you can see the difference between a with and without shot using the filter. It definitely does enhance the bright stars and takes away some of the smaller ones leaving a less cluttered image. Both of these images are straight from the camera with just a few LightRoom tweaks. Overall pretty happy with the result, it does seem to simulate the feel you get from high thin clouds which I find difficult to do in post.
When I tried pushing the image with the my normal processing steps (remove the stars, clean and stretch the Milky Way, some noise reduction and then add the stars back with some star reduction) the result was, however, very blah. Not even going to show it (it was that bad).
So what to do? And then I remembered another YouTuber (sorry I can’t remember who) compositing a filtered star enhanced image with an unfiltered one. Worth a try.
Combining the filtered stars with the starless image from an unfiltered shot.
The process here (using the two shots from the top of the post) was:
Open the unfiltered image into Photoshop.
Use RC Astro’s star exterminator to remove the stars.
Process the starless image using the camera raw filter as per normal.
A little bit of extra levels and curves adjustment.
A little noise reduction using Topaz noise reduction plug in.
Open the filtered shot into Photoshop in a new window.
Duplicate the image (command J)
Remove the stars using StarextErminator.
Change the blend mode to difference to get a star only image.
Copy that image and paste it into the original starless Milky Way as a new Layer.
Change the blend mode to screen.
Flatten and done.
I have not pushed this image really very far or touched the saturation as it was just an experiment and I could have done a lot more with it, but I like the outcome. The thing I really like about doing this with this filter system is I can just quickly plop the filter magnetically on the front of the lens without having to faff around screwing filters on in the dark. Alway leading to lots of risk of screwing up (pun intended) the polar alignment and focus. Definitely something to try in upcoming landscape shoots.
