Aurora Borealis

Really nice capture of last nights display.
I might be tempted to change up the WB to eliminate the violet sky though

John Labrenz wrote:Really nice capture of last nights display.
I might be tempted to change up the WB to eliminate the violet sky though

Thanks, John. I played with that a bit, but the pano shots that I have show a distinct violet glow over the green that fades off to a normal color night sky. I don't have much experience shooting the Aurora. Here is a copy of one of my raw panos to illustrate. Thoughts?

Spectacular! How do you stack 14 images without seeing star trails?

Joe Lemm wrote:Spectacular! How do you stack 14 images without seeing star trails?

Thank you, Joe! You can use auto-align in PS after masking off everything but the sky on each layer, but I get better results going about it the slow way.

My stack and align process:

I do mild exposure, highlights, shadows, white balance, noise, sharpening, coma correct in LR. Do not lens profile correct ( it will make things harder later) Do one image and then copy the settings to the rest you plan to stack.

Import as layers to PS.

If you have a set group  that you want as your foreground, make them invisible. If not, duplicate your layers and set the duplicates to invisible.

For your visible sky layers, make them all invisible but the one at the bottom of the stack. Create a layer mask that covers everything except the sky and copy the mask to each sky layer.

Starting with your bottom layer visible, turn on visibility on the layer above and set the layer to difference. Hit Control+T. This will allow you to manually align each layer. Use a combination of Free Transform and Warp until you get all of the stars to align (turn black) It's a tedious process, but goes quicker with practice.

Go layer by layer, from bottom to top, Only having two layers visible at a time; the bottom one, and the one you're aligning to the bottom one. When finished with each layer alignment return the layer to normal.

Once finished aligning, make all layers visible, delete masks and convert to smart object. Under Layers, choose smart object, then stack mode and select median. That should clean it up and decrease the noise.

Repeat for foreground, align the various layers (all should be smart objects at this point) flatten image and go about your usual editing process from there. You can profile correct at this point. (profile correction makes aligning layers exponentially harder from my experience)

Hope this helps!

Gorgeous image as is!!

Amazing work and the process sounds daunting.

Nicely done and well composed. I was waiting to see some aurora photos. Good one.

Spectacular! Love the reflections. Don't see why the sky shouldn't be purple.....