A little help understanding editing in Lightroom please

[Tony Starks]

I've been quite keen to try my hand at capturing the Milky way after seeing the stunning images in here, so I treated myself to a Samyang 14mm Lense and patiently waited for a clear night.

These are the best I managed but it seems most people tweak their images to get the best out of them so I got the Lightroom trial and tbh I'm stumped. Theres a whole world of confusion there.

I was wondering if someone could have a play and give me a brief summary of how they got there so I can get a bit more understanding and understand how I can get similar results.

Many thanks

Alex.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/139460340@N03/shares...

[Otispunkmeyer]

Can't get at LR at the moment but what you have as a base looks rather good! I think it's RobDickinson? On here who manages the spectacular night sky shots. Not entirely sure if some of his are multiple exposure (I.e one for the landscape one for the sky) but hopefully he can chime in and help you out.

My advice would be to go into the develop module once you have imported the raw files and then perhaps try some presets related to contrast and punch? Then just try fiddling with sliders on the right hand side to see what happens!

[Colin RedGriff]

Yep the develop module is what you want. Using the tabs on the right hand side start at the top and work your way down.

The basic tab gives you the main control sliders

The nice thing is any changes you make can be undone so you can play around as much as you like you can't break anything. In the lrft hand tab look for the history section which shows all the changes you made. You can go back at any stage to one of the steps in there.

Have a look on you tube for some tutorials if you are completely stuck. I think the are some on there specifically related to processing stars

[Craikeybaby]

I also follow the "start at the top of the right tool bar in the develop module and work down" editing workflow. I often don't need to touch a lot of the options though. If you are mainly doing one sort of photography you can make generic presets too, which can be implied on import.

[noell35]

Have a play with the saturation and clarity sliders. Maybe use the graduated filter tool (have a look on youtube)

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-complete-picture-wit...

[Fubles]

| http://thumbsnap.com/70WfBBZw

I am by no means any good at LR, I wanted to just play for fun while my baby was shouting. I added a gradient filter masking off most of the image, with a small taper over the land at the bottom, then decreased the blacks, increased the whites and played with the shadows and highlights til it looked ok ish., had a play around with a few settings before going into the detail tab and adjusting the noise reduction.

Would've been easier with a raw file so you'll probably have much more success. Just play about with things and zero everything if it goes tits up.

[Tony Starks]

That's heaps better thanks guys.

Fubles, that's much better than my current attempts lol

I forgot to mention the moon was out aswell.

Edited by Tony Starks on Tuesday 19th January 08:44

[Tony Starks]

d a bit of a play and seem to get it to a reasonable degree. In the small LR window it looks ok, but when I make it large its very grainy.
What do I need to scale back to reduce this?



4rd attempt by alexander Lisney, on Flickr

3rd attempt by alexander Lisney, on Flickr

[mike80]

You could try playing with the noise reduction. Problem is, you are already shooting at quite a high ISO which makes them a bit grainy to start with.