This is part 2 of a two part series. Part 1 of this series went over shooting and initial editing of this image. If you haven’t read that post, I’d recommend going back and reading that post before going forward with this post.

This isn’t an exhaustive Photoshop how-to, as there are so many YouTube videos and blog posts out there to teach you how to do the things I’m going to go over. I’m going to touch on each of the things that I did in Photoshop in this post to make this photo turn out the way it did, and my thought processes behind it all. I feel like if you can get an overview and some thought processes, you can get an idea of how to apply them to your own photography.

Let’s Get Started

To catch us up, we shot a single exposure, and exported two separate exposures from Lightroom. One exposure was for the Milky Way and the night sky, and the other was for the foreground and the mountain. Here are our two images…

We’re going to layer them in Photoshop, and then add layer masks to show/hide different parts of each image. This will give us a composite image that has the foreground exposed properly, and the night sky properly exposed to bring out the most detail we can get from the Milky Way.

Again, this isn’t an exhaustive Photoshop tutorial, so many of the things you’ll see here are not going to be exactly as they appeared during editing, but they do give you an overview of the process…

Let’s start with masking. We want to mask the night sky OUT of the foreground photo, because we want to bring the night sky in behind the foreground. You’ll want to turn off your night sky layer and make sure you have your foreground layer selected. You also want to be sure that your foreground layer is above your night sky layer. What we do is select the foreground layer, select the layer mask icon in the layers panel, and paint out the night sky with a black brush. Once you’ve started a rough mask, you can select the marquee tool in your toolbox (or hit the M key on your keyboard) and click on “Select and Mask” on the top of your screen. Once there, you can refine your mask. You’ll end up with something that looks like this…

Now, when you turn on visibility for your night sky layer, the underexposed foreground will be covered by the foreground layer, but the night sky will show through what you masked out of the layer above it. It would look something like this…

Now we’re getting somewhere, right? It still doesn’t look quite right, but we’re getting somewhere. This is where the artistry comes in. Some things to notice now…

• The foreground doesn’t look quite right
• The night sky looks a little strange
• The path looks flat
• There are some natural highlights and lowlights in the foreground

A Note About Layer Masks

You had already created your layer mask for your foreground layer. This layer mask can be applied to other layers too. The next few edits are done specifically to the foreground layer. To achieve this, I create a new adjustment layer from the bottom of the layers palette and then select which adjustment layer I want to apply. Once the layer is created, I can hold ALT on the Keyboard on Windows, Option on Mac, and drag the layer mask I created on the foreground layer to the new adjustment layer I just created. The mask will be copied to that layer, which means that the edits that the adjustment layer makes to the image will be made selectively, based on the mask, which in this case is applied to the foreground layer.

Back to Editing

Let’s start with the foreground. It looks a little too orange’ish. I was out there at night, and the tones would have been more cool. I went with a simple solution, I added a Photo Filter layer, gave it a dark blue color, and increased the percentage to 52%. This gave the foreground a light blue hue, you can see that below…

That cooled it off, but this was late at night, and there wasn’t that much ambient light. I create a new adjustment layer for Exposure, and lower it by -.83. Now it looks a little better…

When you lower the exposure of things, you typically need to warm them back up. Rather than going back in and adjusting the previous cooling adjustment layer, I decided to create a new adjustment layer to warm it all up. I did it with another Photo Filter adjustment layer, Warming Filter applied at 15%. Here’s the result of that adjustment…

I’m feeling much better about the foreground now. It still doesn’t quite have the dynamics I’d like, but I have a trick for that. Many years ago, Chris Orwig mentioned in a session, “Soft Light is a Photographer’s best friend.” He was referring to the soft-light blend mode in Photoshop. I’ve never forgotten that, and have found that statement to be endlessly true, in so many different scenarios.

One of the best ways to add dynamics to a shot like this is to add a new Saturation adjustment layer, completely desaturate the layer so that it turns your image black/white, and then set the blend mode of that adjustment layer to Soft Light. This will immediately add dynamics and mood to your photo. At 100% opacity, it will typically be too heavy-handed, so you’ll want to back it down to something more reasonable. For this shot, 46% seemed about right. I added it to the entire shot, so I didn’t apply it to only the foreground layer. This adjustment benefited both the foreground and the sky. Here’s the result of that edit…

At this point I feel like the entire image could use a little punch, so I turn up the exposure just a little bit with a new Exposure adjustment layer…

At this point, I’d say that we’re pretty close to there. The foreground is fairly well lit and exposed and looks like night time. The Milky way is showing through well, and the image is pretty well balanced. The image is still missing something though. It’s still missing that dynamic, moody feel I’m going for.

Adding Dynamics

Here’s where artistry and your own preference come completely into play. When I look at this photo, I see a few things that I’d like to accentuate and draw attention to…

• Highlighted cholla cactus tops
• A path that I’ve hiked hundreds of times, but that looks flat
• Light and dark spots on the mountains
• Some spots in the Milky Way I’d like to bring out

A Note About Individuality

You may look at this image and notice completely different things. You may have chosen a different composition, and have different things that you notice. It’s important to realize and remember that the entire process, from start to finish, is driven by your approach and your creativity.

There are some technical processes and practices that need to be done correctly. You have to focus on those. Those are your price for entry. You have to know these things. You have to practice them. Once you have those things well in hand, you can go to work on your own craft. That’s when you deviate, that’s when you personalize, and you begin to add your own individuality.

Sometimes it’s frustrating to get stuck in “doing” and not “creating” the way you’d like. Stick with the doing though. Make notes, hold to your vision. You’ll get to a point where you’ll start to deviate and innovate and put your own stamp on your work, and your work will be your own.

Back to Adding Dynamics

The Dodge tool in Photoshop will allow you to selectively lighten an image, like running a brush over your image. Inversely, the Burn tool will allow you to selectively darken an image in the same way. Dodging and burning are old darkroom techniques where the person creating the exposures would selectively darken and lighten images. We’re going to use these techniques to add dynamics to each of the layers.

Dodging and Burning are not non-destructive though. This means that once you’ve done this to a layer, you can’t adjust it. So before you dodge and burn, you want to create a copy of the layer you’re going to work on.

Focusing on only the foreground at the moment, I mentioned that I wanted to bring out the highlights on the chollas, wear a path that I’d walked a hundred times before, bring out the highlights and add to the shadows on the mountain, and add some overall dynamics. Through dodging and burning, I achieve the following results…

I want to add some dynamics and bring some of the milky way out now too. So I made a copy of the layer that holds the sky, and went to dodging and burning here too. Part of the challenge with dodging and burning is that it’s easy to get heavy-handed with it. The great thing is that we’re on a copy of the layer. This means that we can adjust the opacity of the layer that we’re working on.

If the editing starts to feel a little heavy-handed, you can adjust the layer opacity to help bring it back down a little bit. That’s exactly what I did on my sky layer. The dodging got a little heavy, so I backed the layer opacity of the new layer copy back down to about 85%, and it did what I wanted it to. Here’s that result…

You can see that I added a little more atmosphere to the Milky Way, helping it to stand out against the night sky, and helping it to compete with the newly lit objects in the photo.

Wrap Up

That’s it! That’s how I got to my final result for this image. This final image matched the vision I had in my mind for the image I wanted to take. While the image itself is great to have, the experience of being out there under the night sky, with a good friend, taking the photos and having discussions was a big part of all of this. The photo is just a representation of how I experienced that night of photographing the Milky Way over the Superstition Mountains. What you can’t see is my friend Mat next to me while we discussed the types of things that you almost can’t help to discuss under a night sky, staring at the Milky Way. It’s important to remember and understand that, that memory, that mood, all goes into the final product. The final photo reflects the experience.

Your final photo(s) should reflect your experience. Don’t forget that the work of a photographer is to be a witness, and then communicate that through your photography.

Good luck in your photography adventures!