Milky Way over Fruita Schoolhouse - Capitol Reef National Park, Utah

Final image is a blend of two exposures and several post processing steps in Photoshop ~ © Royce Bair

NightScape Exposing and Post Processing Tutorial. Last autumn I photographed the historic, 1896 one-room Fruita schoolhouse in Capitol Reef National Park. Here is a step-by-step tutorial of that process.

A quick overview shows the original camera raw exposure on the left. The second image is with a Photoshop Curves adjustment to the sky. The middle image shows a very long exposure to record foreground detail from starlight. The fourth image is a Photoshop layer blend of the two previous images. The final image shows building perspective adjustments and minor color changes. © Royce Bair (click image to enlarge)

Image #1. Original camera raw exposure with light painting. F/2.8 • 20 seconds • ISO 6400 • 3800ºK White Balance. Two Z96 LED panel lights were used to do stationary light painting (during the 20" exposure) on the schoolhouse —one was about 100 feet away, to the left, and the other was behind the building, shining through a window to simulate a kerosene lantern inside the schoolhouse. Orange filters (3200ºK) over the lights were used to create a warm color balance. Light intensity on the schoolhouse was reduced by a -2 EV (using the dimmer switches on the panel lights). Canon 5D Mark III with Tamron 15-30mm lens @ 15mm.  © Royce Bair

Image #2. The night sky has been selected and a contrast producing S-Curve adjustment has been applied via Photoshop's Curves (using a Curves adjustment layer).  © Royce Bair

Image #3. A second exposure was made only minutes after the first exposure. This exposure is for additional foreground and landscape detail, and is made using only starlight —the panel lights were turned off. The exposure was f/4.0 (for added depth of field) • 785 seconds (with long exposure noise reduction turned on) • ISO 3200 • 3800ºK White Balance. Note star trails in the overexposed sky.  © Royce Bair

Image #4. A blend of the starlight exposure (selecting only the foreground portion) and Image #2. The blend is made using Photoshop layers. © Royce Bair

Image #5. Final image is partially corrected for keystone distortion that comes from aiming a wide angle lens upwards to include more sky in one's composition. Correction is via Photoshop's Edit > Transform > Distort menu. Partial correction causes some cropping of the image. Full correction can produce an architecturally correct image that is not always aesthetically pleasing —which also results in even more cropping to the image. Some additional color correction was added to this final image. More technical details and explanations for shooting, planning, and processing are in my e-Book. © Royce Bair

 

Special Pricing on Adobe Photoshop Elements 13 until Midnight!

Adobe Photoshop Elements 13 for Mac and Windows - Download or DVD version
Special pricing (only $44.95) Expires Tonight at 11:59pm -  While supplies last!

Special Pricing on Adobe Photoshop Elements 13 until 11:59 P.M. Tonight (May 4, 2015): Only $44.95! SAVE $55 (regular price $99.95). Mac or Window — Download version or DVD version.

I've seen discounts before as low as $79 or even $69, but never this low.  Although, I prefer to use Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop Elements 13 is still an amazing program, and at this price, it's a steal! This special offer is coming through B&H Photo Video.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 13 for Mac and Windows is a versatile and intuitive editing and organizing program for managing a complete digital imaging workflow. Beginning with a wide range of photo editing and enhancement capabilities, Elements 13 presents a breadth of tools for automatically optimizing the look and feel of select images and retouching unwanted aspects of individual photographs. Features to help accomplish this include Effects Variations, Crop Suggestions, Guided Edits for black and white photos, and Photomerge Compose.

POTW: 'Something Different' by Dan Barr

"Something Different" ~ © Dan Barr (click on image for a larger view)

This unique star trails photograph was taken in Culp Valley within Anza Borrego Desert State Park. (Culp Valley is about 12 miles west of Borrego Springs off of the State Highway S22 and is accessible by a 4WD road.) Dan Barr captured this image with his Canon 40D, using a Tokina 11-16 f/2.8 lens (additional EXIF: focal length was 11mm, 30 second exposures at f/2.8, ISO 1600). This is a "stacked" star trail. Dan used 135 individual exposures to make a composite in Photoshop.

Technique: Barr decided to try a new processing technique for this star trail. He usually assembles his star trails in Photoshop by opening all the images as a layered document and changing the blending mode of each layer to "lighten" to create the trails. This time he thought it would be fun to try to make tapering trails to give the star trails a meteor-like effect. He made the tapering trails by varying the opacity of each layer in Photoshop.

The "tapering trails" idea became somewhat of a pain in the neck! Dan changed the opacity in 5% increments so there was roughly seven images for each increment descending from 100% to 0% opacity. It involved considerable trial and error to get a degree of taper he was finally happy with. Finally, to top it off he increased the exposure and contrast of the first exposure in the star trail stack to accentuate the stars and create kind of a cap for the fading star trails. The resulting image was very different from any of his previous star trails, and he had a lot of fun trying something new.

The light painting was completely by accident! "I was fumbling with my keys and accidentally pushed the unlock button on my car remote," says Barr. "The sidelights and interior lights came on briefly and illuminated the boulders. I usually don't worry to much about stray light in my star trails since I can usually mask it out when I am assembling the image in Photoshop. In this case I liked the the effect from the car lights, so I left it in."

Challenges : "For me the biggest challenges in taking this photo were compositional and in post-processing to assemble the final image," said Dan.

After taking many star trails he has learned that he likes to try to include some of the landscape into the shot in addition to the foreground elements to give the final photo a feeling of depth. Dan wasn't happy with the topography of the surrounding landscape so he just decided to fill the bottom half of the frame with boulders. Still, he was worried that he was going to end up with a boring two-dimensional photo.

Satisfaction: "When I actually got home and started assembling the image, I was pleasantly surprised. The light from my vehicle provided some dimensionality to boulders, and I was pleased with the overall framing," reports Barr.

More of Dan Barr's photography can be seen at his Flickr photostream and his website.