This is the first of two posts that explain my process for creating this image. This first post focuses on taking the photo and using Lightroom. The second post focuses on Photoshop and touches on individuality.

I wanted to share a little bit about my process for how I took and edited this Milky Way photo at the Superstition Mountains in Arizona. First, I feel like a little background as to why I even care to share my process to begin with is important…

We all see photos that we like. If you’re a photographer, you may decide that you want to get out and take a similar photo for yourself. You may want to challenge yourself, or you may want to see if you can replicate it. I think it’s super important to recognize that as photographers, we’re all constantly learning. We learn different techniques and get ideas to create new ones. We end up having a collection of techniques and ideas that we can put to use in different scenarios.

Not every technique, not every setting, not every idea, will work for every scenario. It’s why presets are great, but they can only take you so far. Presets typically work for a particular shot, or a range of particular scenarios, but they don’t work for every single shot. Hopefully, what I’m going to explain for this photograph will help to set you on your way to creating your own shots, with your own vision.

Quick Note About This Post

This post is by no means an exhaustive “how to” tutorial. It’s intended to give you a broad overview and give you some ideas for how you can approach your shooting and editing for yourself. I wanted to share my processes in case it helps any other photographers. I share a few ah-ha moments I’ve learned along the way, so that hopefully somebody that comes across this later can learn from the years I’ve spent learning this on my own, and can get to innovating that much more quickly!

That said, this post is intended to help you understand how an idea for a photo becomes a reality, and how a raw images becomes a final product. You can see the before and after below…

Location

First, I went out on this particular night with a good friend, Mat. We planned for a clear night that we knew we would see the Milky Way over the mountain, with no moon in the night sky to compete with the light of the stars. There are plenty of trails that lead to the Superstitions. Mat had recently been out in this area, and decided that we should meet up in this particular area for a few reasons. First, it gave us a nice foreground for the shot. Second, it was easily accessible, and we didn’t need to hike very far to take the photo.

Once we arrived, we spent about 20 minutes setting up and finding the best spot to photograph from. I tried different foregrounds, but ended up settling on a trail leading to the mountain to kind of match the Milky Way in the sky. I framed the cholla cactus to fall to the sides of the trail. The location was set, so now I needed to dial in my camera settings.

Camera Settings

Admittedly, my lens for this type of photography isn’t the most expensive, and that’s okay. I’m able to achieve results like this, so I’m pretty happy with it. I use a Rokinon F-2.8/14mm. You typically want to shoot night sky and milky way photos with a lens with a wider field of view. I shoot with a 14mm lens. It’s an older lens. I shoot with a Canon R6. This particular lens doesn’t communicate with the camera very well due to its age. I discuss the needed settings on your newer cameras to work with older lenses in a previous post.

You’re going to need to recover A LOT of detail in editing, so make sure that you’re shooting in RAW. RAW will capture more information – it is an uncompressed version of the image your camera is capturing. JPEG is a compressed image format, and will give you less information to edit later. Make sure you’re shooting RAW for this.

When you focus for this type of shot, you need to focus your lens at infinity, but then back it off just a little bit. To check that you’ve done this well, you can point your camera to a light that is far away, or to a bright star or planet, and then electronically zoom in on that subject and adjust your focus until that subject is as sharp as you can get it. Typically, that’s going to be to full infinity focus, then backed off just a hair…

Once you’ve set your focus, you can compose your shot. Take into account your leading lines, subject, and balance. You can also use the Rule of Thirds, watching your horizon line. I won’t go deep into composition in this post. I will say this though – make sure you have a vision for your shot before you settle on a composition. Take some time to understand the shot, and what your final output will look like. Taking this time to have a vision for your final photograph and compose your shot will make all the difference.

Each camera will be a little different. For my particular camera, I shot this at ISO 12800. Because the earth is constantly moving, you typically don’t want to shoot a milky way photo for any longer than 10-15 seconds because the stars will appear blurry in the sky (since they’re always moving!) I shot this for 15 seconds. I could have bumped it down to 10 seconds and increased my ISO, but I was trying to decrease noise in my photo.

Higher ISO values will let more light into your photo, but will also increase the amount of noise in your photo. This isn’t always such a problem with the night sky because its full of stars, but when your foreground is noisy too, it can be a bummer. Many photographers will actually shoot 2 separate photos, one for the foreground with low noise, and one for the sky, exposed for the milky way, and then composite them. I didn’t do that for this shot, I kept it to a single exposure.

Once you’ve set your focus, settled on a composition, and set your camera settings, it’s time to start shooting. It’s best to shoot with a remote shutter, if possible. My camera will communicate with my phone via Wi-Fi, so I do that. Keep in mind that if you do that, it will use battery more quickly. If a remote shutter isn’t available, typically you’ll be able to set a 2-second timer. You’ll press the shutter button and then back away from the camera. You do this to avoid any camera shake at all.

Shoot, recompose, refocus, and repeat!

Editing

You’re home, and ready to edit. Here’s the shot as it appears, straight out of the camera without any editing. I use Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and Topaz tools to edit my photos.

Frist thing, I cropped the image. The cholla that sticks out on the right is distracting, and rather than try to remove it later, I decided I would crop the entire image down some to focus more on the mountain and crop out some of the messy edge shapes.

It’s pretty bland, pretty flat, and a little scary to see once you load up your image in Lightroom. Your work is going to be cut out for you! Luckily, you shot RAW, so you’ll be able to work with this. Looking at this, there are a few things you’re going to want to accomplish…

• Darken the sky
• Brighten the Milky Way
• Light the foreground
• Add depth
• Make the photo look how you remember it looking

Lightroom has some simple tools for achieving your goals. The settings below aren’t the exact settings that I used for this photo, but they give you a good idea of what you’ll need to do to accomplish what you need to do. Be sure to read through it though, because there’s a plot twist…

I typically start at the top of this list. First, I adjusted the color balance. It obviously wasn’t this dusty and brown looking. I set that first to be closer to what I remember. I dropped the exposure just a hair to darken the entire image. I pushed the contrast up quite a bit. This increases the contrast between dark and light objects. This helps the stars to stand out against the dark sky. The highlights will increase the brightness of the stars, but also the glow of the city lights in the distance, so you have to be careful with that. You don’t want that competing with your stars. Pulling the shadows up helps brighten some of the darker areas. For this particular shot, it mostly affected the foreground, so that’s why they’re pulled up. Again, increasing the whites increased the city lights in the distance, so I had to be careful with that. Pulling the blacks up helps the foreground to look closer to what I remember it looking like.

I finish with setting the texture, clarity, vibrance, and saturation for the image. It’s super tempting to bump the clarity because it’ll make your image appear so sharp. What clarity does is increase the contrast between light and dark objects by increasing the contrast at the borders. When you bump the clarity up high, you end up with a very unnatural looking image. It’s always obvious when somebody is heavy-handed with clarity. That’s not a judgement, but it does tend to make things look kind of like a felt poster. It’s worth going easy on the clarity for your final image quality.

Sharpening settings – Sharpen the image until it’s too much, then back it off a little bit. Add some masking to further refine your sharpening so that it affects the bigger edges. While you do this, hold the “Alt” key on Windows, “Option” key on Mac, and you’ll see the mask.

Noise Reduction – You shot this at a high ISO, so you’ll have some noise to remove. I use Topaz DeNoise between Lightroom and Photoshop, so your settings may be a little different. Don’t worry about removing all the noise though. Noise in your photo is natural, and trying to remove too much will make it look like a painting.

Lens Profile Correction (not shown) – Lightroom will adjust your photo for you based on the lens you use. Just select your lens type, and Lightroom will automatically adjust the image to account for the distortion from the lens. While you’re in this area, remove the color aberration as well.

Plot Twist – Two Exposures

So now, I have a foreground and mountain that look like I remember, but the sky still isn’t right. I mean, I didn’t really see the milky way the way the final image is going to show it as, so It’s obvious that I’m going to need to work with 2 separate exposures – one for the night sky and one for the foreground, to make this turn out the way I’d like.

Go ahead and export your photo once you have your foreground exposed the way you like.

Now it’s time to go back and start editing for the Milky Way. There are so many blog posts on how to edit for the Milky Way. It’s all based on the image you took, so exact settings really won’t apply.

These settings apply more to the sky. I dropped my exposure a little more. I bumped the contrast a little bit more. I dropped the highlights quite a bit because the city lights in the distance were causing problems. I brought down the shadows a little bit. I took up the whites, which brought up the city lights some, but also brought out the milky way. I also almost completely got rid of the black values.

I bumped the texture and clarity a little bit, pretty much left dehaze where it was, and increased the vibrance and saturation of the sky.

Again, you can go in and make other edits that you see as necessary. You can think of these edits as global edits. These edits are applicable to the entire image, but we’re going to ignore what these edits are doing to everything but the sky. Once you’ve completed these edits, go ahead and re-export this image with a different filename.

Now you have 2 images, exactly the same composition, but completely different exposures. You were able to achieve this fairly easily because you shot in RAW, remember? These two images allow you to expose for the foreground and the mountain, and the night sky separately. Your next step will be to make a composite in Photoshop.

Noise Reduction

I actually prefer Topaz DeNoise to Lightroom’s denoise function. I feel like Topaz DeNoise does a little bit better job with noise reduction in photos like these, given that it’s an application that is committed to only reducing noise in photographs. I use Lightroom’s noise reduction in my portrait photography, but when I shoot landscape and night photography, I’ve found Topaz DeNoise works better for me for those purposes. This isn’t a paid promotion or anything, just a note on my processes. It has some additional settings and parameters that help to give a little more fine control to reducing noise in photographs. If you don’t plan on using Topaz DeNoise, feel free to experiment further with noise reduction in Lightroom.

Wrap Up

That’s it for this post. We’ve covered a lot of ground here. There’s enough settings and processes to experiment with here. The main ideas were…

• Choose a clear, dark sky
• Have a vision for your photo
• Compose your shot
• Focus to infinity
• Shoot in RAW
• Edit for foreground
• Edit for night sky
• Export two separate images for a composite in Photoshop
• Light noise reduction in Topaz DeNoise, or noise reduction in Lightroom before you export your images

Photoshop is where we’ll put everything together and give the photo it’s final look. You can find the 2nd post in this series here.